Forever Enough
by anotheropti
Summary: They meet in a park, his knees bloody and her eyes huge at the sight. Somehow that makes the most sense and despite years changing them, and making everything seem so weird at times, they'll never stop being best friends. *Childhood Friends AU*
1. Nine, or a Bloody Knee

**A/N:** A not-so-original, new AU idea I had that bit me so bad I had to write it. I didn't want to force a specific rating on people at first, even though I know this is going to contain stuff well beyond a G rating by the final two chapters. Anyways, any feedback would be awesome.

Each chapter is a year in the life of these two in this new setting. I can't wait to introduce new characters into the mix, but for now let's have them meet!

As of the posting of this first chapter, I wanna wish happy birthday to a friend who's having a less-than-stellar time. I know things suck right now, and I can't do much but I can post this first chapter and hopefully give you a smile for a little while. It's not a new laptop, but it's the best I can do. I hope you have/had a nice day!

 **Fair warning: The content rating of this fic WILL change by the final chapters. Thank you for understanding.**

* * *

It all starts with a sunny day.

The kind of day where people risk going outside to travel between pools, walk dogs just as profusely angry with the heatwave, and stepping barefoot onto the concrete is a death sentence. No one ever dares to go outside and exercise, not in Pawnee, instead relying on long lawnchairs that they spread out underneath some shade and love to claim that they're suntanning. People water their gardens with little hoses, the ones kids love to drink out of. It's not a blistering heat though, a dry sort of wave that feels good to go out into after a long day inside a damp, air-conditioned mess of a school or office building, and the citizens of Pawnee couldn't be happier with it. After all, it meant that the public pool might be opening up soon and then it'd get closed soon after. Likely due to a then-recently discovered raccoon's nest, but still the point stands:

It was nice out. For once.

Andy loves days like this, though. There's so many dogs, all the time, and wherever he goes he meets a new one or three. Most of the them are friendly, and the ones that aren't he knows by now so it's never a scary thing to do much with dogs other than roll around with them and play fetch with sticks. School hasn't even started yet but he's convinced third grade is going to be way cooler than second grade already, trying to tell his brothers about it but they're all in middle school already where things _matter_ and class is _serious_. Until then, Andy's going down to the little park just down the street from his house and roll around with some awesome dogs.

His brothers shout at him to leave, all of them annoyed at being around a little kid. Sometimes he wonders why his mom had to get him when all of his brothers were so much older than him, but they let him play their video games and eat some of their leftover food so it wasn't all bad. Plus, he always had friends at the ready when he got older. Walking down the street towards the park, he notices a big orange truck at the house a few doors down from his. The people that lived there moved away a little while ago and it's weird to see someone there so soon, but maybe someone cool was going to be his new neighbor. Andy already had tons of friends, but more was always better anyways.

When he finally gets to the park, only two others are around. A tall, lanky boy who looks a little younger than his brothers sits on a bench nearby, staring between the pages of a comic book Andy can't quite make out the name of, occasionally saying something to a little girl sitting on one of the swings. He's been to this little playground a lot, he's basically the king of it, and Andy's never seen them before.

Interested more in the new people than bouncing the partially deflated dodgeball to himself over and over, he jogs to the swingset. Nearly tackling the open swing next to the girl, he laughs but gets nothing from her. When he looks over she's still blank-faced and only barely swinging. Her eyes are wide and _huge_ and just as terrifying.

"Hey, I'm Andy!" he says with the same energy he has for everyone. People are awesome.

The boy on the bench glances up briefly before returning to his comic.

"You should see me swing, I can go super high!" he kicks down on the dirt and pushes backward, launching himself in the air as high as he can.

With every period of the swing, he watches the girl stare forward. Maybe one more swing would get her attention, and he tries it but she continues to just look bored and away from him. Silent, she never says a word to him either. It's kind of frustrating, but he's also weirded out because _everyone_ thinks he's fun and _everyone_ loves watching him swing. This is probably the first person who just ignored him.

"Look!" he shouts from the height of his arc. "Hey, look!"

"No," she finally says and her voice sounds so tiny and mismatched to her angry demeanor. "You're stupid."

Andy's face falls and he doesn't bother to kick himself back into the air. "What?" he asks, unsure if he heard that right. No one's ever called him stupid.

"You're dumb," she turns and he sees something else in those scarily _big_ eyes. No one's ever been mean to him like this, not even his brothers, but here's this girl.

Without thinking, he pushes himself back further in the middle of the swing. Andy goes so high that he has to hold onto the chains, thinking he'll slip off of the seat but never feeling anything but an intense forward push in his gut until he's at such a speed that he goes flying off of the seat on the next forward half of the arc. With a roll, he lands on his knee with a soft _thump_ just in time to hear someone come running and hear - above his own whining - laughter.

Turning his head in disbelief, the little girl is running after him and laughing. At him. Andy looks down and sees blood on his scraped knee and the girl keeps laughing at him. Instead of being angry, or sad, or confused at all he feels something way different. This girl was all doom and gloom and called him stupid the first time she spoke a word to him but Andy's goal was to make her laugh. Now, she was. Those eyes had something crazy behind them, a little scary and totally weird, but she was openly laughing before her lips tightened and she offered him her hand. Taking it, he gently stepped onto his injured leg and squinted.

"That was cool," she whispers like she isn't used to speaking that often.

"Was it? It hurt. Like a lot. I've never gone that high before," Andy says with a wide smile, almost forgetting the pain in his leg because the girl smiles too and that feels really cool. "I'm Andy!"

She shakes her head. "You said that," and for a second he's worried she'll grimace again. Instead the girl just smiles a very weak, shy thing that's kind of funny.

"You're weird."

"You're stupid," she bites back but Andy doesn't say anything else. "I'm April."

"I'm-"

"Andy," April smiles again and he kind of wants to hug her but she's _way_ smaller than him and that seems weird. "You're bleeding."

She points at his leg matter-of-factly and Andy looks down. It's not pouring over, but there's definitely a light smattering across his kneecap where skin scraped and it makes him wince to bend his knee. April's face stays blank when he does it but her hand twitches like she's about to do something about it, apparently deciding better of it.

"That was so cool wasn't it? I like _phew_ flew and then fell and _crack_ ," Andy makes wide gestures with his arms and wobbles on his hurt leg, making April smile a little. "That was cool, right?"

"You bled, so it was cool," she nods.

He thinks for a second before getting an awesome idea. "You wanna be my friend?" he asks forthright, squinting away the bright sun to look at this short, kind of frightening girl with huge eyes.

"Sure," she shrugs before squinting. "You're older than me."

Andy nods vigorously, excited by _something_. "Oh, do you go to school? You should go to Pawnee because it's awesome and the teachers suck so you can do whatever you want-"

"I'm in first grade," she says quietly, looking down.

"Cool! I'm in third. How old are you?"

"Six."

"You're a kid!" Andy laughs, smiling and remembering to slightly shift his wounded knee away from April's potential attack.

"So are you," she says incredulously or as incredulous as six-year old can be.

"No, I'm a _big_ kid. You're a _little_ kid," he shoves his thumb into his chest, puffing up big. April shakes her head and the smile drops. "I'm nine! I could show you how cool some people are and how stupid the teachers are about stuff like worms. Ms. Hopkins never catches me putting worms in her drawer."

"That's awesome," her eyes widen again, glancing quickly at the boy on the bench. "Do you know where we can dig some up?"

"Yeah, I can show you," Andy starts to move but whines when his leg revolts in pain. "Ow! Um, I'm gonna get a Band-Aid. You wanna play at my house?"

April looks over at the boy again and looks down at the ground. Kicking up dirt in her little shoes, she seems even smaller now. Something about that is odd but Andy's used to towering over every kid in his class so it's not that strange. Besides, she's super little and super young so it's not that weird. But she looks at the boy and shakes her head.

"I'll go ask," she runs over to him and the boy stares at Andy hard before shaking his head. Returning, she shrugs. "Sorry."

"It's okay, we can play at school or later," he smiles at her and April's face struggles to match it before failing. "You're really weird."

"Thanks," she says with an earnest grin before going back to the boy.

They both leave and he tucks the comic under his arm and takes April's hand. Walking away, Andy catches the tall boy giving him a stare, as if eying him up, that feels weird. Waving back at him because it feels right, and April's cool so this boy must be cool too, Andy's greeted with a chuckle and the two turn back around to walk away.

Getting back to his house takes a while, but when he does there's sandwiches out for supper and his mom is strangely missing. Still, he wanted to hang out with that girl and there's only so much he can do with his brothers before they get mad about being around a little kid. At least with her he could go dig up some earthworms and she might laugh when he got hurt or said something stupid.

* * *

When Andy goes home after a return visit to the park, his knee still battered and trying to limp his way around the whole thing and only realizing he can't move that well, his brother Aaron asks him where he's been. Aaron's supposed to keep track of him, or so his mom says, and he usually makes sure Andy has his lunch before going to school. If Andy forgets, or forgets to take the weird little pills that make his brain feel less like a storm of ideas, Aaron reminds him to make his lunch and sometimes they make it together. That usually ends in a lot of peanut butter fights, some of which Andy actually wins but he isn't entirely sure how you're supposed to win a peanut butter fight. Either way, his brother's great.

"I went to play at the park," Andy answers, shrugging and opening the fridge to look for food he knows isn't there. He could eat the whole fridge and still be hungry.

"You shoulda told someone," his brother comes up and smacks the back of his head playfully, making Andy chuckling. "Mom was wondering where you went. Told her you were probably there."

"There was a super cool girl there, too," Andy slammed the refrigerator door closed and slumped down in front of the kitchen table, tapping his feet on the chair legs. "Oh yeah! I hurt my knee and she laughed."

"You better get that cleaned up before mom sees it," Aaron chuckles and stands up, Andy following suit. "She'll freak."

"Cool."

Everyone except Andy has access to the first aid kit. Something about him being the one who would break everything or eat some Neosporin, but all Andy knows is he gets to put that really relaxing cream all over his knee and slap a Band-Aid on top of it all. When Aaron puts away the little white box and locks the cabinet door, he slips the key in his pocket and gives Andy a sly grin. The one that usually happens before Aaron whispers a dirty joke into his ear that Andy doesn't really get but knows he's supposed to laugh at. So he laughs.

"So, a girl right?"

"Yeah, she's cool. She's got these crazy eyes and they're all big but she's tiny, like smaller than mom, and her name's April," Andy says in a rush.

"What'd you guys do at the park?" he wiggles his eyebrows and Andy smacks his brother's arm. "Rude! Seriously man, what's she like."

"Weird," Andy responds immediately.

"Nice," Aaron taps his shoulder before starting in a singsong voice. "Andy's got a little girlfriend."

Bristling instantly at the thought, he grimaces and pushes his brother just a little. "No I don't!"

It doesn't matter. Once Aaron's gotten his head around a joke, it never leaves him. The song follows him throughout the day, a dumb collection of notes that are just as annoying as the first time. April isn't his _girlfriend_. She's a girl, and his new friend, but not a girlfriend. Thinking about the difference makes Andy's head hurt, so he gives it up to worry about when dinner's coming around.

The rest of the night is filled with questions about his new "girlfriend." The inquisition lasts all the way through his bedtime, where he flops down on the lower bunk and has to listen to Aaron sing his dumb song. He's dumb.

* * *

When the first day of school rolls around, Andy seeks her out on the playground. As if expecting him, she's sitting on one of the swingsets alone. Rocking back and forth gently, she holds onto the chains and looks at him. Andy waves at her with that same joyous excitement, but she doesn't return it. Instead she just looks back down and squints.

"What's up?" he asks, planting himself on the swing next to her.

"Nothing," she mumbles, moving back and forth a little. "How d'you go so high?"

Sensing an opportunity to make her laugh again, Andy lets his feet sit on the dirt track underneath the swing and smiles.

"You gotta push down and go really hard," he tries to explain but she just gives him a confused look. "Like this!"

With an exaggerated motion, Andy kicks himself into the air and goes back a few feet before swinging forward. After a few seconds, he slows himself down and looks at her expectantly. Another moment passes and he shows her again, hovering and gliding through the air on his seat, until she moves a little and pushes herself off the ground. April only moves a few inches but her face lights up instantly, her feet braking until she's stopped altogether on the ground. Watching him for a few more passes, she digs her little shoes into the dirt and launches herself backward as hard as she can.

It doesn't send her nearly as far as Andy's kicks did, but she did catch air with every swing. Filling the relatively quiet corner of the playground with laughter, Andy's smile grew even wider when he hears hers join in for a totally awesome mixture of whirring air by his ears as they swing out of time with each other. Trying not to go so high to fly off the swing again, Andy laughs when she loses a little control but then her voice gets weirdly scared and he stops himself again. April slows down eventually and he grabs the chain of the swing, bringing the whole thing to a halt just as her eyes widen further and she looks like she might cry. It's definitely way different from the April he's used to, all creepy and scary and into maggots, but it somehow makes sense. Then again, he's a kid so he doesn't really give much thought to it. He just wants her to laugh again.

"Are you okay?" he asks her sincerely, getting off the swing and looking down at her.

April looks up at him and nods slowly, letting a smile drift over her lips. "You're cool."

"Sweet!" Andy shouts because he already knew that but being told he was cool is always awesome. Especially by someone as weird as April. "You're cool too."

"Sorry for calling you stupid," she looks down at the ground but Andy doesn't know what to say so he just laughs.

They're silent after that, walking over to a dirt pile where they search painstakingly - and without success, sadly - for ants before the bell rings. Going their separate ways, Andy wants to wave at her but April isn't paying attention anyways. Spending the next few hours annoyed that recess is over and that Ms. Hopkins won't get any dirt or worms in her desk today, he's relieved when school's over and he has to walk back home. It's not that far from the school, only a few blocks, but when steps out to the bus line he catches April bouncing on her feet in the parking lot.

A car drives up and she gets in, a bald man glaring daggers at Andy as he waves. All the way until they can no longer see each other, that bald guy keeps giving him the worst stinkeye he's ever seen and it all sort of sinks in. Now he gets where April's mean side comes from. Still, when he gets home he'll probably go over to her house and see if they need help moving and if April wants to play after. When Aaron and Adam hear about it, they get the rest of his brothers to go along and bring the rest of the sea of brownies their mother made for them. They were a little old, but it was better to share than just leave everything for themselves so the brothers walked down the street poking fun at Andy until they reached the front door.

April opens the door, seeing Andy. He waves at her, a giant grin on his face and she cracks the littlest smile at him. Aaron holds out the brownies and declares they're here to help get them moved in, to which April turns around and walks away without a word. She's really cool, he decides then. His new best friend, April, is awesome.

* * *

 **a/n2:** Any feedback is awesome, like I said. Kudos, comments, everything! No matter how small or insignificant you may think it is, it all matters to me.

Anything else you wanna say (though I prefer comments on here) can be sent in to my tumblr anotheropti!


	2. Ten, or Best Friends

**A/N:** I love this AU, a whole lot, and I feel I should explain that each chapter is a series of important events in a year as I don't have the time nor patience to write a novel here. So, yeah, it's like a series of connected events that define their relationship over the years!

* * *

Andy's the kind of kid that likes to point out _things_. Anything, really, and he likes to point at it, yell really loudly about it, and then smile at everyone because they apparently don't get how awesome it is that this rest stop is eighty-four miles away. He calls out every time it's a holiday, like no one else knew it was coming, and he'll always celebrate Christmas for pointing out how many parts, opposable joints, and colors his new action figures have and why that's way cooler than the ones with fewer. So, really, when he told April they'd been friends for a whole _year_ \- since basically forever - he didn't think much of it.

A full year, and somehow April doesn't stop playing and hanging out. Which is weird, because he's learned a _lot_ about her. Probably more than any of his friends, to the point where they go to each others' houses all the time and at some point a ten-year old and seven-year old playing should be weird but it never is. It only makes sense that she's the best, because all she ever wants to do is dig up stuff. Worms, roots of trees, earthen mysteries that neither are really ready to see, or just dirt for the sake of getting dirty. That made her way better than everyone else right off the bat, and even better was figuring out she was really only two years and a few months younger than him. That mostly bothered her brother, it seemed, and for some reason his brothers were starting to think it was less cute and more weird.

But, really, that just fit their whole friendship.

The fact that she liked to wear, or at least wore them all the time, little dumb dresses that made her look like a baby and those same, tiny shoes and continually dug around in the mud made so much sense to him. It basically made the most sense in the world, because despite everything she tries to do with her whole evil shtick she's always laughing in the dirt with him or enjoying the same dumb jokes he tells all the time. Everytime she got to wear pants - and Andy gave her a little pair of overalls he used to wear for a Christmas gift - it was like watching someone in a new body. She rolled in mud, grabbed every stray leaf and twig, and they had intense wrestling matches (never too intense, Andy knows just how much bigger he is than her which is _a lot_ ) all day. It was awesome. On the same note, since she _was_ tiny in comparison, April rarely wore those overalls just because they were so huge on her, which was hilarious to him in its own way.

When the winter months rolled through, the snows of Pawnee shocked her. Not really understanding how she'd never seen snow before, she tried to explain to him that they didn't really have a lot of snow in Florida. He wasn't even entirely sure where that _was_ , so Andy just assumes it's some mythical place she made up in her head. But April doesn't really have imaginary friends, or if she does he's never met any of them. With the frost of a mostly mild winter, Christmas hits and they have the absolute best time. Aaron and Alex help him figure out a present, and really he thinks the overalls the whole time but they insist on something else, so in the end he just sticks with his gut instincts and gives her the strangely large denim. She seems to like her prettier clothes, but there's sometimes when she runs around in the overalls and they play at farming. Usually April plays the role of a witch harassing him, which should scare him probably but in the end it's all made up (at least he hopes) and it's just funny to watch her try and be scary. April by herself, regular April, is scary enough. Affecting a weird voice and wearing a blanket as a robe just makes her laughable, so Andy tries to stay in character.

As the year passes, Andy wants to get her _another_ present for her birthday but that doesn't really work out as well as the first time. As it turns out, giving April a spider was not the right call. Andy just thought it was cute but she nearly screamed when she opened the little box. He let the spider out the next day. All the while, he got used to going over to her house often. It's not like he had any homework and the stuff he did have was boring anyways.

Her brother, Ben, is twelve and does everything that a twelve-year old boy does, nerds out about, and angsts over with the best of them. Sometimes he seems cool and other times he tries to pretend to be in charge, usually when he actually is after their dad leaves for a few hours but he isn't _that_ much older than Andy. That leads to a lot of funny exchanges between him and April ("Andy can stay here, you don't need to watch me." "Go away, ghosts don't need babysitters.") Ben's a total nerd through and through. Everything in his room screams it - his pile of comic books in the corner, soon turning into boxes and boxes when Andy and April scoured his closet, and the piles of little notebooks filled with weird stories told them everything. They were really confused about the notebooks. Names of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ characters filled the pages, but Andy didn't remember watching any of these episodes.

Going over to play usually meant hearing Ben watch countless reruns of the show, and the two of them caught quite a few just to make fun of it. They're all boring, but sometimes April reminds him of the Borg in a very scary way before she starts laughing and Andy feels much better.

Sometimes that means Andy stays over to eat, because April doesn't tell him to leave and her dad never kicks him out. _He's_ crazy. It makes all sorts of sense that this is her dad, because he's always grumpy looking but calm unless prodded too hard. Andy's got a way with poking people in just the right way to make them angry at him, something he got good at with his brothers over the years. Stares are shared with April's dad, Ben looking uncomfortable when it happens and, even worse, crumbling when he has to deal with those eyes piercing his very soul. That's what Andy thinks it's like anyways. He's never been very good with words and he's only ten, so he never really worries about it that much.

Sitting at dinner one night with Steven - _Mr. Wyatt,_ he always reminds Andy to call him - and the rest of the family, Andy gets a thought. He's never seen anyone but Mr. Wyatt around. There wasn't a second where he thought about asking April about it, but sticking peas with his fork and chewing rice loudly, because Andy chewed everything loudly, seemed as good a time as any. The long table in their dining room was weird to sit at, April and Ben across from each other and Andy across from Mr. Wyatt. It felt cool, like he was at the head of the table. Trying to work up his courage to say anything, Andy looks at his peas and eats one carefully. It still tastes weird and old. Swallowing it, not wanting to get a glare when he spits _this_ one out, he finally speaks up.

"So, um, sir… is April's mom, uh," Andy swirls his fork through a little rice, noticing April's face fall. "Is April and Ben's mom coming here?"

He sighs. "They're different people, son," Mr. Wyatt takes another large bite of his steak, Andy trying to ignore how good it looks. He's confused by what he means though. "They have two, different mothers."

"Oh," Andy nods. "Cool."

He just had one mom, who was awesome. Then again, he also has five brothers and April only has one. Every day he realizes there's a lot different about them, but she still feels like a cooler friend than most people. But moms... April has two? That doesn't sound too crazy to Andy - one of the kids in his class has two moms - but he doesn't think it's the same thing. Steven, _Mr. Wyatt,_ Andy berates himself in his head, clears his throat like he's practiced this speech.

"Ben's mother was a good woman; would've stayed with her for a long time if she didn't… leave," and Andy sees Ben wince now. He's not smart, but this seems wrong and kind of mean. He swirls his glass and points it lackadaisically towards April. "Then April came around."

Her face doesn't change at all, still stabbing peas and her chicken with exaggerated _thudding_ on the table. When Andy did that his mom told him to stop playing with his food, but Mr. Wyatt didn't seem to really care for better or for worse. Really, that seemed to be his motto. There's a cold, strange silence after that exclamation. Looking over at Ben, just glancing, he gets even more confused by how mean their father's being, especially to April.

"You say that like she's a problem," Ben mumbles.

"What was that?" his father says loudly, much louder than Andy expected.

For a second, no one says anything. April fidgets in her seat, still staring at her food, while the whole atmosphere dies out. Not that hanging out here was ever joyous or particularly fun with her dad around, but he didn't like April going over to his place so Andy figured it'd be just as fun here. For the most part he's right, when it's just them and Ben and it turns out he's not that weird or dumb but it's still kind of hilarious to watch him freak out when April tests how long he can handle her staring at him with her head tilted low like she's going to attack. Ben never lasts very long.

"Nothing," Ben mutters.

"No, speak up. Say it again," Mr. Wyatt almost _growls_. Andy suddenly notices how angry that all sounds. "Say it to my face, son."

"I said: you make it sound like April's a problem," Ben glares him in the eye and then stands up, throwing his silverware on his plate.

No one says a word after that, Ben slamming his door just a few moments later. April doesn't look up until the noise ends and then briefly glances at Andy, then to her father. He seems to give his daughter what Andy guesses is a feeble attempt at warmth, and all that comes out of it is a bizarre half-smile that dies out before it ever reaches his eyes. For the life of him, Andy's confused and doesn't get why the conversation's going so strangely. Why couldn't they just be nice to each other?

April stands up and puts her fork down, kicking her chair out and walking out of the room without saying a word.

"A bunch of drama queens," Steven grumbles, cutting another bit of his steak and chewing it furtively. "You can go too, son."

He points out towards the foyer with his knife.

Andy stands up, putting his fork down and getting ready to take his plate over to the sink. His mother would kill him if he didn't at least clean his plate off before putting it into the sink to be washed. After all, Alex's job was dishes but everyone had to play their part. Instead, Mr. Wyatt just shook his head.

"Leave it there, I'll take care of it for you," he says with something that isn't really kindness. His voice doesn't seem very capable of it, all heavy in his throat and stained with something that probably makes him even angrier at night. "Go home. You can come over tomorrow; it's almost April's bedtime."

"Okay," Andy nods but then Mr. Wyatt looks up at him intently. "Sir."

A smile passes over his face before he takes a drink of the brown liquid in the little, squarish glass next to him. Andy nearly runs out of the house, trying to figure out if he wants to go over there anymore. Then again, April wouldn't go anywhere so he has to. She's too cool, anyways. Even if her dad is scary, she and Ben are awesome. Sprinting back to his house, like he's afraid Steven Wyatt will appear behind him to scream, Andy almost pulls the door off of its hinges when he flies inside and has to take a few, deep breaths to relax more.

Now he knows why Ben likes to be in charge of April, why they don't talk a lot about their parents, and why April doesn't really talk.

* * *

At school during break, the day after the most awkward dinner of his life, Andy notices that the swings on the playground are empty. Usually they spend recesses at the swings, the only two that bother with them anymore, eventually moving to some pile of dirt or playing in the mulch underneath their feet just there at the sets. The crunchy, messy mixture of wood chips and other assorted junk cut him and April up sometimes, but that just made it more fun to pretend that they were digging deep into the ground for people. Sometimes they were trapped miners, sometimes corpses. Either way, it was fun and walking away with brown stains up and down his arms and cuts around his wrists was so worth it.

That day, she wasn't there. Slumping his shoulders, Andy went and played dodgeball with his other friends until he glanced over at the slide and saw her going down it and then walking back up to the landing a few feet off the ground. Instead of taking it again, she just sat there and put her arms over her knees and let her head drop onto them.

Running over, ignoring his game and the other kids shouting at him to come back, Andy climbed the playground equipment in a flash. Before she could even look up, he had bounded up to her and sat next to her. April didn't move or say anything. That wasn't that weird, though. She didn't like to talk that much anyways, so Andy usually did it for the both of them as he said. The first day he suggested that, they were playing a game where she was mute and instead of speaking had to whisper in Andy's ear and let him translate to Ben that he was a dork. It was fun, but she also said the funniest stuff sometimes so Andy doesn't mind when she says it in her weirdly scary, tiny voice.

April just sits there, kicking her legs out from the structure, only getting contact on the backs of her legs.

He doesn't know why it makes sense, but the only thing he can do is put his arms around her shoulders and hug her tight. She twitches, almost retracting and flinching, but then April settles and she's so _cold_ and definitely the smallest person in the world that it hits Andy all at once and he wants to hug her harder to make her warm again. Keeping his head far away from her, Andy gives her a final, light squeeze before breaking away and looking ahead. Silent, they watch other kids play and he wonders if that was the wrong thing to do. Physical games and messing around didn't bother her, and she wanted to learn how to play football with his brothers but Andy didn't know if her dad would be okay with that and learned he definitely wasn't, but this was different.

Minutes pass without a word, or a shared look. For a second he thinks she starts to speak but then it's lost and that's okay. They had tons of fun for hours on end without either of them saying a word, sometimes going whole days trying to see if they could go it silent. As recess comes to an end, she taps her shoes together and gets up. Andy follows her and they take their separate ways as usual, still not saying a word.

When Andy gets home, a long while later than April who gets a ride from her dad just like always, he opens the front door and inside Aaron gives him a little box. There isn't much of a smile, let alone his usual stupid grin, on his face this time, even when Andy sees that there's a note glued to the top of the box saying _April_. Usually her gifts were met with a joke or two, but he only had a mild, somber look. It's one of those pencil cases with the ridged, plastic lids and Andy thinks it's going to be another dead animal. Popping it open, inside is a pile of leaves and a frog. It's still alive, _ribbiting_ and staring at him. Beside the frog is a little note, written in crazy lettering with crayons Andy knows April has.

 _You're my best friend._

* * *

The next day, at April's house doodling in red clouds onto the knife wounds she drew on the piglets in a stupid coloring book, it hits Andy how he's going to be in a different school than April for two years. It's kind of weird, and scary since he won't get to see her at recess until then, but they'll probably keep hanging out. Lying down on his stomach next to April, the sight must be humorous to anyone else. April's little legs barely reach down to his knees, her extended feet still a crazy distance from his ankles, and they bump into each other while filling in hilarious images with as much red as they could and leaving scary, bloody faces across the pages. Andy doesn't really like to color that much anymore, especially after being yelled at by his brothers that it's what little kids do, but April still likes it and she always has awesome, creative ideas for making every sheep intended to be cute as a lamb to look more like a demonic goat-creature after they were done.

The light of her bedroom lamp, the one next to her bed, illuminates their work. Her face when she's concentrated is so weird, her nose wrinkled up at the bridge and her eyes staring with intense focus. She doodles with her left hand, something Andy tried and couldn't figure out. It was okay though since April couldn't do it with her right. He always wanted to be left-handed for some reason, just because it seemed cooler, and since April was that just made her even more awesome in his eyes.

"Will you still play?" she asks quietly while she stays intent on her drawing. April's started talking a little bit more, and Andy never stays for dinners anymore. "At my house? We can do all kinds of stuff here. There's a cool spot in the backyard where I think someone died."

"Awesome," Andy murmurs.

"So…" she trails off, putting her crayon down and looking at him.

"Dude, you're cool. We'll hang out here now," he nudges her shoulder and April laughs. That meek, tiny thing he can make her do usually only when he hurts himself. "You wanna make a clubhouse?"

"What?"

"We can go in the woods behind your house and find a tree and call it our clubhouse," he explains. April's super young, so she needs it sometimes. Except when she knows more about something than him, then it's just the other way around. It never really bothers him when that happens, because it means she'll talk and it's fun. "Or we can try and make one, too. That'd be awesome."

"Yeah," she nods.

For a few minutes they keep at their work, finally finishing and looking at what they've done. The lines of a star are now jagged with red and black spikes, linking together to make it look like a fuzzy starfish with an angry little face in the middle of it all. Laughing to himself, Andy rips the page out of the coloring book and walks over to the corkboard on April's wall just above her little desk. Taking a thumbtack, he pins it alongside the other drawings. Various demons and monsters line the little brown canvas, steadily filling up with crazier and crazier looking drawings. Apparently April always used to do them, but before she came to Pawnee someone talked to her and told her drawing that stuff was bad.

Andy just thought it all looked cool.

"You're awesome," he hears April mumble behind him.

Turning around, she's standing up and staring at him. Taking a few steps forward she tentatively wraps her arms around his waist, answering his hug from the day before. Without saying a word to her, he returns hers and when they break away she's smiling. Wide, something he never thought he'd see and with teeth he wasn't entirely sure were as soft and flat as regular people teeth, half expecting jagged fangs to show where her real, normal teeth were. He lifts his hand up, waiting for her, and April slaps his hand in a high five that makes them both grin wide.

There's something important in so small an action. Maybe it's because he _wants_ to be her best friend and she's just admitted that he's awesome - which he definitely is, Andy knows that - but it feels like they're sealing a deal. Making a pact. They're signing an agreement that no matter what happens, they're gonna be best friends. No matter what's wrong, they've got each other's backs. Or, maybe, it was just a really cool high five. Either way, Andy's happy with it.

Then her dad screams for dinner, and Andy makes his way home. At least he made April smile, and they hugged. When he gets home, there's the assumption that someone will ask him what he did at April's house that made him smile so much. Then again, Andy always smiled. Still, he wondered about what to say and considered talking about how awesome getting a high five from April was and how hugs made her happy. Thinking better of it, he never tells Aaron about it. After all, April's just his friend and he doesn't want to hear his brother get all weird about things anymore.


	3. Eleven, or Building a Clubhouse

**A/N:** _Sorry for being gone so long! I hit a stumbling block on this fic where I needed to rewrite two chapters and I hadn't gotten around to fully completing that rewrite. I don't plan on keeping this on a set schedule (hopefully weekly, though!) but I do fully intend on finishing this fic._

* * *

The first day at a new school is all sorts of strange, and it always is for a little kid. It's worse for Andy, because all these new sights and hallways and people, all the new classrooms he wants to go check out and see if they're any different or cooler, just fuel his imagination and spark that wanderlust through the building. Instead of going to homeroom like he's supposed to, and he still isn't even entirely sure what homeroom is, Andy ends up walking down the different, maze-like paths with rows and rows of silver-blue lockers lining the walls. Every few feet there's a door breaking up the lockers on either side of the hallway, dull fluorescents in the ceiling barely illuminating anything and, in the morning light, only heightens that atmosphere of newness.

Andy takes another corner into the seemingly endless labyrinth of corridors before he rounds on a small gathering in the cafeteria. A few kids sit around two tables with their backpacks still on, tapping their feet hurriedly or playing on phones, and most of them are much older than him. Strangely, there's no teacher around but there is a sign with the words _Comic Club_ on it.

Then, Andy sees Ben in the front by a sign-up sheet. Smiling, Andy walks over and greets him but is only met with a dull groan and something about how he can't join their club.

"Your club meets on the first day of school?" Andy asks precociously, picking up the cardboard sign and spinning it in his hands. Nothing cool on the back like _Football Club_ or anything. "That's stupid."

"It's our first meeting after summer break and-" he stops and sighs before speaking again. "Look, why am I even telling you this? Go away, dude. No one wants a little kid around, Andy."

A few people look at Ben, including a girl next to Ben that Andy instantly wants to tell that she's cute, but he just grumbles something and returns to staring down at the table and his phone. Andy just waves at someone in the back for no real reason other than he looked up at him, and then continues his journey through the school. Still wearing his backpack, he ends up walking down the exact right hallway at the exact right time just to look at his schedule for the first time the whole morning and see that the math classroom he needs to be in is right there.

This school's awesome. Except, really, save for seeing Ben and getting to know the school layout Andy's kind-of bored.

But he does meet a little guy, like just _tiny_ and almost as small as April (a thought that bums him out for a second), named Tom. He talks way, way too much and, when Andy sits next to him, the teacher gets so angry that he keeps saying nonsense to Andy that she separates them. It's a great start already, and gets even better when Tom tosses him a straw and, together, they shoot spitballs at the teacher.

Thankfully, they miss every single time and manage to put the straws and paper balls away before they're caught. Andy definitely likes Tom, but he never sees him again that entire day save for lunch.

And, at lunch, he's too busy when the pretty girl from the Comic Club sits across from him and takes out a brown bag and sets it in front of her like this is normal. It gives Andy the chance to see that she's got really curly hair, or at least she looks like she does something so the ends look like that, and he's caught looking at her, staring really, when she laughs and he's broken from his reverie.

"Hey," she says quietly. "I'm Ann."

"Oh, cool," Andy says, still sort-of dumbstruck.

"And you're Andy, right?" she points with the bagged sandwich she pulls from the bag. That reminds Andy to take the little punchcard in his pocket and, after this, go get some food. "I can't believe Ben was so mean to you earlier. Do you know him?"

"Um, yeah," Andy neglects to tell her about April because, as awesome as she is, she also happens to be eight years old. That might, as it turns out, lead her to make fun of him. "Do you like comic books?"

"No," Ann scoffs, unzipping her sandwich with neat, slow motions of her fingers. "It's just an extracurricular thing. Plus, my homeroom sucks."

"What's homeroom? Tom keeps talking about it, but I'm super confused," Andy scrunches up his eyebrows, so unsure what homeroom is. In elementary school he always went to the one room. "Does everyone go to different classrooms all day? What's up with this crappy cafeteria? What are clubs-?"

"You're funny," Ann interrupts, as blunt as his questions were numerous. She smiles, and Andy _really_ wants to tell her she's pretty. "Do you live in Eagleton?"

"No," Andy shrugs. "That's where rich people live."

"Yeah, Leslie says everyone over there is a snob but I'm not sure how she knows because she _always_ says stuff, like, Eagleton's the worst place on Earth and she never wants to go there," Ann says quickly.

"Oh, who's Leslie?"

"She just graduated college and teaches U.S. History here and in the high school," Ann nods, smiling brightly. "She is _so_ nice, and I think Ben has a crush on her."

"Woah, really?" Andy chuckles.

"Yeah, he always talks about her at club meetings," Ann grimaces and then dons that same smile Andy's a little smitten by.

"Are you in the same grade as Ben?" Andy asks with a bit of disappointment in his voice. If she was two grades ahead of him like Ben then she wouldn't want anything to do with him, and _she_ was so nice.

"No," she answers, pulling the breath out of Andy as he smiles. "I'm in sixth grade. You're new, right? I've never seen you here before."

Andy looks down at his punchcard, biting the inside of his cheek. "Fifth grade. Just got here," he says quietly.

"You're so tall for a fifth grader!" she exclaims, and it's true. Andy towers over most the kids he passes, and even Ann. She's up to his chin, and yet he's the _smallest_ of his brothers.

Andy just laughs and then shows her the card, walking up to get his lunch. There, he discovers the terrible cheese sandwich, consisting entirely of a hamburger bun and a slice of crappy yellow cheese, and a regular milk are what consists of his lunch. It'll have to do, and when he sits down Ann looks at his plate, her eyes squinting and her mouth doing a little punctuated tightening, before she reaches inside her bag and pulls out a bag of chips.

"You wanna share?" she asks, holding out the bag to him.

Andy bites the inside of his cheek. "Nah, that's your lunch," he shrugs.

"Which is why I said share, dude," Ann says with a laugh. "I never eat them all anyways."

"My mom always says not to waste food," Andy looks at the chips and reaches out for them, brushing his fingers on hers and, if he's not stupid which he sometimes,usually, is, something warm beats in his chest. "So, sure."

After a quiet lunch, Tom focused more on other people than Andy and the weird situation, he walks her over to go toss out the paper bag. It seemed right at the time, and when he sort-of follows her he can only shrug when she asks what he's doing. Ann calls him funny again and, when he takes his plate back up to the lunch line where he can see people doing dishes and gets his little index card punched, he realizes that he really likes her. Not in the same way as April, though. He wanted to be best friends with her, but Ann was cute and funny, and nice, and he wants to keep talking and hanging out with her.

When they regroup at the lunch table, a few minutes left in the period, there's one question that burns more than anything else.

"Seriously, what is homeroom?"

* * *

When he gets home, the first thing Andy does is bolt over to April's house. Her dad is gone for the day, apparently something about a work-trip or something that Andy forgets in an instant, so they decide today is the best day to start working on the clubhouse they've been planning and gathering supplies for since the last they talked about it. Andy ripped out planks of wood from his neighbor's crappy little fence, unsure _what_ they'd use them for only knowing that April would figure something out, and he took an old rug in his basement for the same reason.

They set up base camp just outside the little outcropping of trees lining her backyard. Thin trunks with wispy branches flocked together in a tight copse behind her house, none of them fitting for a treehouse, and he wasn't sure he could even be supported on one of them but what does he know, and so they decide to take one of the trees closest the house. That way her dad wouldn't get mad and say he couldn't find her, and they could dress up a tree however they want and just call it their clubhouse.

"That sounds cool," April mumbles.

"Oh I didn't even tell you about school today!" Andy says and April's face falls a little bit, if her face can fall from an even stare to a slightly less-even stare. "It was so fun! There's all these hallways and classrooms, and have you ever heard of homeroom?"

"Cool," she shrugs, ignoring his question, and takes the small bucket of nails Andy stole from his brother Alan's little woodshop in the basement when he took the rug.

"You want help?" he offers, watching her struggle with picking up a board. She really _is_ tiny, he realizes, when she can't even get a plank herself.

April glares at him, and for some reason she seems mad. He doesn't say anything, instead a little bummed about because he actually missed her the whole day. The real scary part of middle school was _no recess_. It wasn't just that April wasn't there to show him a cool mound of dirt that she built with her hands, stuck twigs into, called Ben and then kicked into rubble, but that when he looked at his schedule again he realized they weren't allowed to go outside unless it was gym class. Which, above everything else, was the real trauma. Why was middle school so different?

He didn't bother to think about that for the rest of the day, but he did remark how weird it was not waving goodbye to April at the end of school every time. Picking up the plank for her, he smiles wide at her but gets nothing in response. Lifting it up to the tree, he watches her fumble with a nail and stick it a little in the plank before leaning down, one hand holding the nail in place, to grab the hammer Andy also stole.

She focuses on the end of the nail, squinting one eye and sticking out her tongue like she's concentrating. Lifting the hammer back, she slammed it down, hard, intent on hitting the nail. Instead, she hits her thumb with a sickening _thud_ and it takes, at most, one second before her eyes go wide, then shut, and her mouth opens into a wail of pain.

"Oh crap!" Andy exclaims, dropping the board to the ground when she falls down and holds her hand in agony. "Are you okay? You're okay. You're okay!"

No matter what he says, April keeps howling and, when he looks again, tears are streaming down her face. Frozen with indecision, Andy stands stock still and looks around, unsure what to do. April cries out again and it's tiniest, most pitiful sound ever and all Andy wants to do is make it stop and let her know she's okay.

Instead, he just keeps standing until the back door of their house opens up. Ben sprints, as best he can, across the field to April and gives him a deadly glare before looking down at his sister.

"You okay, sis? What'd you-?" he looks at her purple thumb and the discolored fingernail once, her face stained with tears, frowns and looks back at Andy.

"What should I-?"

"You should go home!" Ben interrupts.

He screams it at Andy, violently, and if he wasn't a gangly little boy Andy was sure Ben would pick her up but instead takes her free hand that April isn't holding close to her mouth, the one with the hurt thumb, and walks her inside the house. The door slams shut and Andy looks back at the things they took for their clubhouse. It was supposed to be fun, and then he went and brought something that hurt her and let her do it herself. He kept slapping himself every time he picked up another thing his brother and mother would yell at him for taking, and now he was going to get in trouble for this.

But that wasn't it. Something else was bothering him. April seemed so _mad_ at him, despite always hanging out, when he mentioned how much he liked school and, now, he isn't sure what that means but Andy does know something is up. His face falls, a creeping, eerie sadness suddenly there, and he walks back home with a satchel full of stolen supplies. And, just like he guessed, he does get yelled at and grounded from going over to April's house for a week.

It doesn't matter. She doesn't want to be his friend anymore, Andy decides. The thought alone makes him so sad that he eats his peanut butter sandwich supper with zero complaints whatsoever, just confusion about why she had to go do that and why he let her.

* * *

When a week passes, April has a huge bandage on her thumb and he wants to say sorry but the first thing she does is hug him and give him a box of crayons. Just like that, she sort-of forgives him. Maybe she doesn't say anything, and Andy isn't even sure what she's supposed to be forgiving him for, but Andy knows he made her hurt her thumb somehow.

"Let's go draw in my room," she offers, a small smile on her face. "It was boring with you gone."

"Um, sorry for… uh," he points at her hand with the crayons and shrugs.

"No, it's super cool," she waves it around and stares. "It's really creepy and Ben says it looks gross."

Andy expects her to say that she hates him, but instead runs to the edge of the staircase and looks at him. She beckons with the gnarly looking hand and Andy, relieved, books up the stairs after her and overtakes her in a moment of huge strides over her. They laugh their way into the bedroom, stumbling down on the floor, opening her coloring books, and going to work.

Relieved is really the best way to describe himself there: relieved that she isn't mad; and that she still wants to be his friend; and that she isn't seriously hurt. More than anything, though, it's the latter. Even if she hated him, if April had broken her thumb or anything worse, Andy would have been so mad at himself he would forget to talk to Ann at school or cook up goofs with Tom before math class.

So, yeah, he's infinitely comforted in the, admittedly creepy just like she said, lump of her finger.

* * *

 **A/N2:** _Let me give you some advice: I understand that you mean well when you say something like "please update" but, at the same time, it's also forgetting that I_ write _these fics. It takes time. Please understand that takes time and, sometimes, even if life doesn't get in the way (it usually does) it's difficult getting back on track._

 _I like to make the fics good and enjoyable. Just_ updating _them would be a terrible idea, and I hope you realize that! Don't get me wrong though, I love that you like the story so much that you want to see more of it, but I am also a little disappointed in seeing messages such as that._


	4. Twelve, or Girls are Confusing

**A/N:** _I know I said that I'd update in about a week (somewhere, maybe not here hah) but, well, things are harder than they seem. There is no way I'm leaving this thing unfinished, though. It's already gargantuan, at least in comparison to any of my other chaptered fics, and it's just going to be a behemoth by the end of it all._

 _So, yeah, another year another chapter!_

 _Also, I love the reviews I've been getting and I wish I could respond to some of you folks on the site but, alas, the guest review feature means I can't directly speak with you! That sucks, but do know that your reviews make me so incredibly happy. Seriously, there is very little that makes me want to write this other than my own willpower telling me that I_ am _finishing it, the fact that I love how I want to end this (conceited much?) and then there's the positive messages that literally make me smile every time I get them. They honestly keep me going, and I just wanted to say this for the people that are unable to get direct feedback from me._

 _And, hey, I have tons of other Parks fics! Specifically, April/Andy. My oneshot collection is absolutely massive (100+ different oneshots!) so if you're interested in my writing there is tons on my profile for you to look through :)_

* * *

There's something, maybe not immediately or noticeably, amazing about winter to Andy. Sometimes he thinks that it's the snows, at first slippery and barely crystalline in their early spread only to harden and crunch under his feet later like a pile of dead leaves just a month ago, and that can't be it. It's the snow, yes, but it's also that his brothers take him sledding and they fly down the little knot of a hill, encircled by dozens of kids running up only to slide back down and repeat the circuitous pattern until everyone is bright-faced, red, and full to the brim with winter's cheer. That's why he liked the snow, at least before.

Now it's snowball fights with his brothers, April, and Ben. Coercing the latter into joining them doesn't take long because, after the incident with the thumb and the hammer, Ben doesn't seem to mind Andy that much and it's super surprising. For the first few days he was back hanging out at April's house, he would give Andy curious looks like he isn't trustworthy, or ones that say, "I'm watching you." Andy thinks all of them are weird, and Ben really is weird. Then again, so was April and she might just be the coolest nine year-old that he has ever met so Andy gives Ben smiles and waves and everything to let him know that he definitely doesn't hate him.

At first they consider two teams, but then April picks up a mottled bit of snow, barely a clump, and tosses it in the air. It covers them all in tiny specks and she shouts, in her attempt at a scary voice but still tinny and sharp:

" _Free-for-all!_ "

And that was it. April and Andy dart for the thin tree just beside his house, and right on time as a snowball _whizzes_ through the air and hits the trunk with an unceremonious _splat_. Catching their breath, Andy crouches down low to gather up a pile of snow around them. April uses him as cover, the build up from the branches of the tree providing an ample wall - and potential sniper's post - between the house and the tree. Just as Andy clumps another bit of snow in a rather angular supposed-ball, Anthony cries out and Andy watches him get pelted in the back by Ben and Adam, apparently on the same side, and the betrayer Alex.

"It's a bloodbath," April says enthusiastically, reaching her hand out for a snowball. He drops the first, terrible one into her hand and April grins. Her voice reaches a strangling cry as she shouts, " _Die!_ "

The loosed snowball slams into Alex with surprising accuracy. However, her power is lacking and it doesn't seem to do much. Noticing their cubbyhole, Alex turns just in time for a snowball of Andy's, hastily made when he realized that April would barely be able to catch his attention, collides with his chest and creates a much more violent, dull _thud_ against him.

"Nice!" April shouts, reaching her hand up to high five him.

Andy takes a moment, and slaps her hand. Her thumb never quite looked the same and it always caught him off guard. It's probably all in his head, so he ignores it. Instead he grins and prepares another snowball.

"They've found our secret hideout, Dwyer!" April yells to him, peeking over the edge of their wall to look at the onslaught between the standing four brothers and Ben. Clearly, Ben's truce has run out as snowballs loose into him, sending the much smaller boy crumbling to the ground. "We need artillery!"

"No can do, Wyatt!" Andy returns, talking into an imaginary walkie-talkie in nonsense code and numbers he heard in _Saving Private Ryan_.

Then hell, or a lot of lightly thrown snowballs, rains down on them. April and Andy try their best but, in the end, they've only managed to hit Albert once but they're covered from waist to neck in quickly melting snow. Getting up, April brushes snow and mud off of her (and one thing Andy learned that just ups the strangeness scale for April is that she likes to play in the mud and dirt but when her clothes get dirty she gets _mad_ ) and Andy shakes his off of him like a shaggy dog shuddering a heap of water from his coat. After all is said and done, Ben actually smiles and it's dorky because Alex starts talking to him about whatever geeky things they like and Andy thinks it's kinda sweet. Maybe it's because Alex is almost out of high school and Ben thinks he's cool, like a super nerd, and they walk into the house first.

So, yeah, snow is part of why Andy loves the winter. Another reason is that, when it's frigid outside and they all wear thick pants and coats to stave it off just for a moment, his house is warm and comfortable. Mr. Wyatt laxes some of his grip on his children when April and Ben _both_ complain to him that they want to go over and play, and, really, it's surprising when - after Andy asks, hopeful but knowing it's fruitless - they come over with sleeping bags and pillows for a sleepover.

"Your dad's said you can come over?" Andy had asked, totally shocked that they were going to hang out for an _entire night_. It just sounded so much fun.

"Yeah, he said it's okay," April answers with a brief shrug. "Ben is weird and thinks your brothers are fun."

"He _is_ weird!" Andy says, almost like she didn't just say that herself. Still, it's funny for some reason or other.

Inside the house, after they brush off the remainders of white, flaky snow still clumping to their coats and shoes, kicking it off like dust caught on the tips of his boots, Andy leads April through his house. It's the first time she's been there so, naturally, she needs to see the whole thing herself. After they leave what she calls the foyer, though to Andy it's always just been the front door, he shows her the small kitchen adjoining the dining room. The dining room table is small and barely fits the eight of them, so two of the brothers will have to eat elsewhere so that Ben and April can sit at the table, but Andy thinks it's nice. Two doorways lead out from the roughly square-shaped room, one to the left leading into the little room they called the living room where little more than a couch and the TV sit. One bookshelf with a few books of poetry Andy couldn't really get, though his mother loved, and then row after row of picture books that they all read as little kids, and some that Andy still reads because the pictures are fun and a lot easier to understand than some of the crap he's trying to read in school. Andy didn't bring her there, mostly because she might want to draw all over the books that his mom really, really likes.

To the right of the dining room was the utility rooms and Andy didn't really think that April would want to look at a bathroom and laundry room. The doorway leading to the basement seems to interest her and, when April goes over and twists the doorknob, peering down into the black stairwell, she asks him what it's for.

"That's Aaron and Anthony's room!" he answers excitedly.

"Ew, they don't have their own room?" April asks, shutting the door, standing on her toes, and trying to peek into and up the stairs leading to the rest of the house.

"None of us do," Andy shrugs. April just looks at him in confusion before she bites the inside of her cheek. "Except my mom, though. She has her own room!" April looks like she's about to say something but before she can, Andy offers, "D'you wanna hang out in my room before dinner?"

"Sure," she answers noncommittally but then runs up the stairs with him, and it's a rolling cavalcade of thunderous steps all the way until they're smack dab in the middle of his room. Well, his and Albert's room.

It used to be a spacious little nook in the house, just enough for one bed (now traded in for a bunk bed) and a little nightstand next to it. The roof slants sharply, rolling downward so that, sometimes, when Andy sits up in bed he smacks his forehead on the little slope that's only half a foot from his face. His mother said that, one time, Andy was starting to sleepwalk and they deterred him by simply setting him there on the higher bunk, let him get _thwacked_ a few times, and now he's never done it since. Other than that, there's not much in the room and April looks it over once and then gives him a glance before biting the inside of her cheek and looking down.

"What?" he asks, because she looks really sad about something.

"Nothing," she shrugs it off and Andy remembers that she _is_ getting older because, really, she's less direct with him. Andy's not the smartest person in the world, but he gets that much. "What's your mom making for dinner?"

"Grilled cheese," he answers slowly. April doesn't come over a lot because, really, the food they eat isn't what most people apparently consider food. Tom thinks it's stupid that he eats grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for supper but, hey, it's what he has.

People learned not to bully Andy about that, and it wasn't because he'd beat them up or anything. He'd just get this sort of sad, distant look and when he got home he'd eat his dinner and then go to bed sad, the worst feeling in the world as far as he's concerned. Basically everything about other people told him this: they were poor. They had a house, in a decent part of town, most likely from his dad and his dad's insurance or whatever his mom was talking about over the phone sometimes, but he thinks they're poor. There's seven kids, and they're all boys too, so food's kind of tight he guesses. Sometimes they pick up pizzas and have their own little parties, but that's usually reserved for birthdays and big events, and Andy loves his brothers so, yeah, he just gets sad when people call him poor.

He doesn't know how April will react. Her dad's not rich, but there's only three of them and apparently he has a way better job than Andy's mom. He just doesn't want her to think he's poor and think he's worse because of it. To be honest, thinking about April _not_ liking him hurts a lot.

Instead of any of that, and Andy's brain didn't really think of much of that in the moment, April just smiles and says, loudly, "Awesome!"

"Dude, didn't you bring anything home to work on? Like, um, school stuff?" he scratches the back of his neck, unsure what he's even talking about anymore.

"No," April mumbles and suddenly the room seems colder, like someone kicked a window open or took little chunks out of the paneling that would go unnoticed until now when April's eyes light with something closer to fury and her hands tighten into fists. Only now when Andy realizes that he's brought it up one too many times and it _clearly_ makes her mad. "Why?"

"I dunno, you never talk about it-"

"Because school is stupid," she bites back and her voice loses that childish quality for something that Andy doesn't really recognize. It's mean, but like real-mean as opposed to April's usual aggressive posturing and evil jokes. It's harsh, and her voice is cold when she says, "It's stupid." Then she looks down and grunts, turning around to stomp downstairs out of his bedroom.

It's the first time that Andy realizes April's upset over something. It won't be the last time, but it's weird. Just like when she pulverized her finger, it hurts but for a different reason. Slouching back, a little defeated, Andy wonders why girls are so weird.

* * *

After they settle in for some soup, an inch or so in the bowl for everyone since there were only a couple of cans, and the grilled cheese that is so hot Andy burns the roof of his mouth, and Andy watches Ben sit nervously surrounded by people he only sort-of knows, and April still looks grumpy when she dips her sandwich in the hot tomato soup (something that he tries a moment later and discovers tastes _amazing_ ) it's nearly time for them to head to bed. There is one last thing that he wants to talk to her about, but before long Ben is clearing his throat and walking up to him. It's weird. They don't really have many conversations, or really acknowledge each other, anymore. Sometimes Andy sees him at that little club meeting when he goes to talk to Ann - someone that doesn't make him as confused as April, but really he isn't even sure _what_ she is into other than that she's clearly into being pretty - but they never say a word to each other beyond the bog-standard greetings. It's weird and formal, and Andy doesn't like it that much.

"H-Hey," Ben raises his hand, waves awkwardly, and then clears his throat. Thinking better of it, after holding his hand up for about a second too long, he drops it and sticks both of them in the pockets of his sweatpants. "Andy, I feel like you and my sister are good friends."

"Yeah," Andy nods, looking over at April in the living room sitting with her legs crossed and staring at the TV. "She's awesome!"

"Yep," Ben nods and takes a deep breath like the melodramatic nerd he is. "We should probably get to know each other better then. Because, um, she's… y'know, it's cool that you're her friend."

"I know, right? That's what I always say!" Andy says with a chuckle and Ben actually smirks, and for the first time it feels like it's not at Andy's expense. "I'm confused, though."

"You're a really good kid," Ben says with another nod before he looks into the living room and then turns to walk down into the basement bedroom.

Andy stands there, half-confused and mostly curious about what Ben was talking about, before he looks out to the den himself. A few things were really bothering him about April recently, and one of them was so uncomfortable to think about that he buries it far back in his mind. The first, after bringing up school with her, was easier. Occasionally when they were hanging out before, when they went to the same schools, she sometimes brought up stuff and he generally knew the people that she was, or more likely wasn't, hanging out with. Which teacher was awesome? He knew that, and the answer was almost universally, "None." Now, though, it never came. She just ignores the question, or like then gets mad at him for saying it, and it sucks a ton to be in that position where he hates saying something like that to make her so apparently furious but Andy just wants to know how cool her day was.

The other, though, he thinks about when he walks over to the living room and sits next to her. Lying down on his palms, stretching out far leisurely so that he can look at the TV without craning his neck in a weird angle, he looks over at April. Her hair hides a lot of her face most of the time, at least when she does her usual thing of just letting it drape over her in a messy, straight wall.

Andy thinks about it when she smiles at him and he likes how she's actually _happy_ when she does it, and thinks about how much he loathes the idea that April ever gets sad or angry about anything, and when they color in her books that her dad says she's too old for now, but it's such a pastime of theirs that they do it anyways because she has the craziest ideas about making these little stars and sheep turn into demonic characters and weird, made-up people that they build personalities for. He thinks about it when he notices that Ann is pretty, but because she has really kind eyes that seem to look at him when he talks and inevitably says something stupid. She's just nice overall, and once chased off a bunch of butthead seventh graders that said she was hanging out with a baby, and that makes her awesome.

Ann has all of that, but Andy never really thinks about her after school. It's not that he _doesn't_ , but he is always wrapped up in April too much to do that. They have tons of fun and there's never a reason to think about anything else, and besides, now that they've finished the clubhouse (without nails by request from basically everyone) there's always room to change things around and make it way more awesome.

She looks at him and gives Andy a tiny smile, which is her apology. He accepts it with a massive grin and they both turn to watching cartoons again. Really, it's just that when Andy's watching Spongebob and looking at April just after that smirk, poking at the mottled rug underneath her legs crossed in front of her, he thinks that Ann is pretty and that he might say the same thing about April, too.


	5. Thirteen, or Hormones

**IMPORTANT: The rating for this fic is going to start changing as of now! Obviously, given their ages, this isn't explicit... but the final product (spoiler warning) will be!**

 **A/N:**

 _Oh my God, it's been_ forever!

 _I didn't want it to be this long, and I definitely don't want to give up on this fic!_

 _I hope you understand that this has gone through revision after revision, stop-starting my ability to write, and just everything under the sun that can kill a fic. However, I made a promise when I started this. I love this universe, but it is far harder than the tattoo artist AU! This will, most likely, become my focus as my second job picks up later this month. I hope for bi-weekly or monthly updates again!_

* * *

It happened at some point, a totally random out of the blue occurrence, and Andy isn't sure why he even did it. Well, actually he does know. Tom recently got a girlfriend, Wendy, a girl in seventh grade who spoke in some kind of Midwestern accent. At least, that's what Tom says. She apologizes all of the time and seemed as cute as a button, which was a term Andy heard all the time referring to him. It seemed to fit her, though her and Tom? That one was confusing, though if only because Andy wasn't sure what a girlfriend was even supposed to be. Did they kiss? They didn't seem to hang out much, or talk really, but Tom could talk about Wendy all day. Apparently they made out once, but Wendy never says anything to the positive or negative about it and so Tom continues babbling about it to Andy every chance he can, especially when it's not remotely the topic of conversation. One time, while in history, he professed his love to her with some boring rap song.

She didn't respond.

Andy started thinking about girlfriends, and Tom asked him who he was looking at one day during lunch. He had no clue, and since Ann was out sick Andy didn't have to skirt around the topic.

"I dunno, man," he shrugs it off without the awkward glance around the room that would have been required had Ann been there.

"You probably got it locked up pretty tight with that Perkins girl," Tom says, almost wistfully. "That's dream girl material right there."

"What?"

"She's super hot and she's a nice girl, what more could you ask for?" Tom raises his hands dramatically, like it's the most obvious thing in the world what the answer is.

"Dunno, someone I like doing stuff with?"

"And you don't like doing stuff with Ann? That's why you hang out with her every lunch," Tom begins to list off things and he's just tired of it all. He's been asked this same thing ever since he started hanging out with her. "Going to that stupid comic book club-" He just wouldn't stop talking, and Andy is bored of the conversation. Tom is cool and everything, but sometimes he was also the worst. Especially with his cohort Jean-Ralphio, turning a pair of mildly boring people who, separately, are excited about anything and everything that comes out of their mouths into a wasp's nest of garbage. "Oh, and you even went with her to get stuff for that club organized with that dumb substitute or whatever."

"Oh, Ms. Knope is awesome!" Andy claims.

She really was, though. However, Ms. Knope was a tutor or teaching assistant - or something, Andy couldn't quite remember the word for it and he was too focused on his lunch to care - and not a substitute, like Tom thought. She helped around in seemingly every single department of the school, meaning that Andy would sometimes see her in a math classroom or the special education rooms and usually hanging around the clubs and extracurricular programs' meeting places to suggest ways to improve. That's how Andy met her, like Tom said. Ann was cleaning up a session of board games that certainly had nothing to do with the comic book club itself when Ms. Knope stopped by, Andy hanging around to help move some of the heavier boxes of notebooks and textbooks and other assorted odd jobs the school conned most of the clubs into doing for them.

Andy had been having more thoughts about Ann, and strangely enough ones about April. They were certainly not things he could share with Tom, though. Or, rather, he didn't want to share them with Tom. For all Andy knew, he'd talk about that weird dream where he kissed Ann openly to the girl.

After helping her with the heavy boxes, Ms. Knope suggested they petition for less of this work. It would give them time to make their club mean something, and have a wider reach. Ms. Knope said she didn't quite get what the club even did, unlike something more important such as the junior debate team and chess club. At that point, Andy stopped paying attention. Things like that just got in the way of his thoughts, especially all the talk about the usefulness of a club like theirs. At least Ann always said that she didn't really care about the club itself, really. Not too much.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Tom chides him and stands up to get rid of his own leftovers. "Just don't waste a good thing, my man. You understand?"

"Sure," Andy says despite not really understanding.

* * *

The year had been explosive to say the least, for Andy. Over the winter break he had grown three full inches to his already tall stature and he considered trying out for a sports team. Baseball was fun in tryouts, but then it seemed so boring just watching other people bat and pitch. Half the time, he didn't even know what he was supposed to do and had to be reminded of some very basic rules. But Andy tried a little harder, ignored his English book to read the actual rules of the game because, apparently, that was a thing that he was supposed to do.

But, still, he was no longer quite as gangly as before after baseball season. Running - and oh man, Andy did not anticipate this much - had put muscle on his legs, and lean muscle at that, but pitching was his favorite. There were strategies, and ways to play with the batter that he didn't quite get at first. It was more of a mind game, really, and to Andy's surprise that's almost as fun as just lobbing a ball really fast at a somebody with a wooden bat. Where the chubby, big kid from years ago vanished to be replaced by the leaner, taller version of himself just a few months ago, now Andy feels strangely big.

Even April notices it, and that's most certainly not just because she's now in middle school with him and still the same tiny girl he met on the playground years ago.

It's a warm May day, just before they should be let out for school, that Andy really notices it himself. Even though they can't really hang out they like they could in elementary school, Andy and April make the best of the brief breaks between classes and lunches to walk or talk or, most likely, take the janitor's tools and mops and move them around the building. At first, Andy thought it was mean but April always laughed about it and so he lost whatever weird morality he had about it in that instant. While the trees bend ever so slightly in the steady breeze, leaves whisper along to the bustling crowd of children roaming between classrooms to collect their friends and belongings before they leave for the day. Andy has his backpack slung over one arm, April with both hands clinging to the straps over her shoulders, and she's regaling him with stories of how boring math is.

"Plus, there's this really dumb girl who won't stop raising her hand for every answer," April grumbles. "It's so annoying."

"Aw, but then that means she's smart," Andy tells her, looking over for the witty reply he's sure is to come. Instead of remarking how funny it'd be for that girl to fall into a pool of muddy water, April takes a shaky breath and doesn't look away from in front of her.

Andy turns to look at whatever April can't take her eyes from, and only sees a shortish boy with greasy, dark hair and a silly grin on his face as he says something to the other boys around him. A lot of them, too.

"We should go a different way-"

"Hey, look!" the dark-haired boy declares, pointing at April and Andy. "The weirdo's got a _boyfriend!_ "

They make kissy faces at them, waving and jeering, and it's the same kind of childish torment that Andy's seen before. He remembers seeing it, very briefly, when April moved and aimed at other kids that Andy knew before her. They continue to do it, as if it's some declaration, but they constantly call her that: _weirdo_.

The other one was freak.

Just as they call out, telling her that she should go play in the dirt some more, April looks down at the ground and mumbles something before dashing down the nearest hallway out of sight. Andy, however, doesn't look at her.

He steps forward, some weirdly automatic and mechanical force pushing him towards the group of rather small boys. That's when Andy realizes his size: they are all barely at his chest and tiny, thin things that all stop their laughter when he confronts them. The smirking leader walks up to Andy and looks up to meet his gaze. Whatever that strange push on him towards them was, Andy feels it again and something inside of him is screaming to ignore whatever restraint was in him. He can see, all too clearly, that look in April's eyes as she sped out of the way. She might have thought she was hiding from him, and clearly she was trying to, but it was unmistakeable and Andy forgets all thoughts of that previous day about Ann and clubs and April's goofy sneakers.

"That was super mean," Andy says, and his voice shakes because despite himself he's feeling something else that usually means he's done something bad. "You guys are a bunch of jerks."

"At least we're not dating the _freak_ ," the leader says with a stupid derision that only a child bully has.

"I'm not-"

"Freak-dater, freak-dater!" the kids sing in chorus, and Andy takes another step forward.

Their voices quiet instantly, his large, athletic figure masking them in his shadow and threatening with just his presence. They're all years younger than him, but Andy feels that same thing from just before that he normally hates: anger. A split second thought hits him, and he wants to be angry at them. Normally, it feels terrible and afterwards Andy hates himself for being mean or leveraging his size, knowingly or not, against other people and instead, now, he likes the feeling. They're afraid of him, and rightly so.

The greasy-haired leader steps up to meet Andy, and the sheer size difference - and actual muscle on Andy - hits him after a few moments of staring. The boy clears his throat, as if to say something, but Andy gets an idea and drops his backpack on the ground without breaking the stare.

The sudden sound sends all of them scattering, especially the leader whose eyes bulge out of his head and flees, pushing the others out of the way in his scramble. After a few minutes, waiting for them to return with rocks or something equally destructive, Andy laughs and picks his backpack up. Turning around, ready to find April he sees her wall of dark hair sticking from around the corner leading towards the hallway she had run down before the confrontation. April starts to peek out again, but when she sees Andy looking back she looks around like she hadn't just been trying to watch.

"Um," he says, walking towards her and looking down, that pulse of adrenaline and whatever strange emotions he got from that silly encounter slowing down. "Those guys are jerks, y'know. And stupid. And dumb, and they don't know anything-"

Interrupting him, April darts forward. April, as small as the boys he just chased away, wraps her thin arms around his chest, squeezes him into a tight hug, and buries her head in him. Andy returns it gladly, albeit slower than her, and when she breaks away April looks up at him with a genuine smile.

"Thanks," she says in little more than a whisper, and wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

This little gesture, and when Andy looks at her eyes to confirm it, hits Andy harder than seeing her smash her own thumb with a hammer. No, it's not anger from before. That little sparkle in her eye isn't fun, it isn't what he wants to see there, and it certainly isn't cool. Instead, she's crying there, trying to hide it, and Andy sincerely wants to hug her again.

Instead, they go to the buses and leave in the same manner as always, April waving him away and Andy returning it just so that she can head to the parking lot where her dad is and he can go on the bus itself.

* * *

 _She's got pretty brown hair, and she probably knows how to kiss, and Andy catches himself looking at her all the time._

He's been awake, nervously trying to deal with his situation. Albert snores quietly, alerting Andy to the fact that he's not being watched or something. For the past ten or so minutes, he's been trying to handle this - every few nights he thinks about Ann, and then he reacts noticeably to her. She was cute, yes, but he doesn't really hang out with her anymore, even if Ann is pretty awesome, and yet here he was imagining these really creepy scenarios, and thinking about the way her chest curved more than some other girls and he got this.

It's happened before, for sure, but more and more frequently lately. Sometimes, he even got a boner in school and, frankly, there was little more embarrassing because Andy was sure other people could see. Instead of wondering about that, though, he kept on thinking about Ann.

He thought about kissing her, and wondered if she had ever caught him staring and get unnervingly hard about it.

He's a creepy, creepy guy, he realizes. No one else is doing this, he's sure! Nobody else does this, he tells himself. It's weird, he's certain, but he can't stop and, before long, his hand drifts down yet again.

 _Pretty brown hair and big eyes. Pretty eyes, some color he isn't sure what but it doesn't matter because they're kissing and his hands are allowed to reach up her shirt._

Andy's bed squeaks, and he covers his mouth with his free hand.

All Andy does is thank something that Albert is an incredibly heavy sleeper and it's usually pretty quick.

* * *

The next day, a sunny Saturday that brings the oncoming summer heat in like a wave of heavy sludge, Andy tells himself he's _not_ going to think about Ann at all if only because he's hanging out with April that day. They never speak about the confrontation with the bullies, and especially not about her crying. Ben gives him a much warmer smile when Andy heads over that day, too.

Instead, they'll focus on the clubhouse.

The clubhouse needed refurbishing, a small card table that Andy managed to find in the basement one day obviously now theirs, and it gives them time to experiment with characters and fantastical situations. Their fortress of solitude, the Witch's Hideaway or Hag's Hut as April sometimes called it, was little more than that previous disaster clubhouse against one of the thin trees behind April's house.

They drape a rug over one of the branches, providing a makeshift wall for them on one side, and the other is walled up with a pile of sticks and small logs that Andy finds.

He never tells April about the night before, or any other night like that, even though they share just about everything. There were some things he was sure that a little kid like her didn't need to know, and even so it was probably incredibly unusual to relate midnight doings to a friend. Especially of those variety.

Even so, he wanted to keep their fantasy characters now. Oftentimes, April would dream herself as the Witch Queen of the Forest and Andy became her Brave Knight, protecting her from the stupid villagers who would want to burn her at the stake, and it was their job to set up the fort as it were. The card table becomes their Grand Hall, where April could do her magic spells and make animals her best friends because everyone except for Andy was an idiot that couldn't be trusted. In the small area they had, April took a fold-out chair and set it so that she could look out towards the trees and further into the small wooded portion of their backyards. Meanwhile, Andy would regularly "scout out" and make sure the woods were safe so that Witch-Queen April could perform her daily magical rites in the hallowed Chair of Magic under the growing moon's powers.

The trees spoke to her, so she said, and they said that everyone but Andy was lame. They also told her when to perform her sacrifices of worms and berries, and say a bunch of nonsense that sounds cool to them.

Andy looks out from the rug-wall, and pretends to scan a vast battlefield of oozing swamps coated in the skeletons of wayfaring adventurers with too bright of eyes for this pair. He sees nothing, and the Brave Knight sees nothing as well.

"Your Majesty… I mean, um," Andy stalls because he's done this so many times before and still hasn't come up with a good replacement for Majesty. "Your Witcheriness, I think the villagers have run off!"

"That's because I cast a dark spell to make the trees spring out of the ground!" April drew the blue and white sheet that made up her cloak around her, glancing over her arm like a vampire rather than a witch. "The trees killed every last one of them-"

"I think the trees just scared them away," Andy says.

"Fine," April sighs. "The trees didn't kill them and hang their guts everywhere as a warning. They just spooked them a little."

Andy lifts the stick he found a week or so ago into the air, its hilt-like tilted cross above his fist giving it the sword-like quality he was searching for, and declares the Woods safe again for his Queen.

A shifting sound from behind the tree in the bushes surprises them, and April jumps away from it. Andy lowers the stick and points it towards the noise as if it were a real sword and walks towards the noise. It sounds like a ruffling of leaves on the ground, but April continues to tell him to look out for rabid villagers with pitchforks and torches. He remembers _Frankenstein_ too, _thank you very much_. Even so, he plays along and darts out towards the sound with the stick and watches a reddish ball dart up and into the tree so fast that Andy can't even react and hit it. Not that he'd want to, seeing as it was just a harmless-

"Squirrel!" Andy shouts, trying to look for the poor thing in the boughs.

"Oh, let me see!" April loses whatever fear she had before for immense curiosity, joining Andy and hopping on her toes to look up at the tree with him. "I can't see anything! Are you sure it was a squirrel?"

"Totally," he replies. "It was super scared. I think my awesome sword scared it away… sorry."

"It's cool," April says and then puffs her chest out and resumes her previously regal mannerisms. "You were only doing your duty as my brave, brave knight!"

Andy grins back at her and they go back to fortifying the place with leaves and sticks behind the rugs that compose the walls of the otherwise rugged, defensible clubhouse sat stationed near the tree itself. April continues muttering random things about maggots and crows, waving her hands over a pile of mulch stolen from a neighbor's driveway. Sunlight begins to die down as the Witch-Queen's spells are done for the night, protecting the forest from the evil villagers and all the woodland animals.

Andy notices a little acorn in the mulch mix and points it out.

"It's for the squirrel," she says, but it's a voice of wonder instead of attached weirdness and craziness that her witch accent usually has. "They're my favorite. They should be protected for the rest of the year, and get all the food and babies they want."

"Wow."

"What, I never said I was a bad witch," April defends herself and crosses her arms. "I'm here for the animals! They're way cooler than people, anyways. They deserve to be protected."

Andy nods, smiling. His mind fills with wonderful images of April dancing near wandering deer and squirrels greeting her with acorns, her supposed rags actually magnificent robes of green and her eyes lit up with the wonder of her fairytale existence here. Here, outside of bullying and beyond reality she could be whatever she wanted. She can be the mystical protector of nature, staving off the evil people that make her real life actually worse than just a snide comment could repair, and dug deeper than that, and she could be the weirdo they claimed her to be, and revel in it. It was her escape, and even if Andy only vaguely grasps that he knows that she needs it.

Andy will always be her Knight.

* * *

 **an2:** _If you enjoyed the fic, please consider leaving a review! It means the world to me, and I love knowing that people actually care about this fic :)_


	6. Fourteen, or Girlfriend(s)

**A/N:** _Holy cow, I know. I know, it's been over half a year since I've last updated. I'm not proud of that figure._

 _I refuse to give you guys weak promises anymore. I just hope that those of you that care about this universe and this fic, one in the same not sure why I differentiate there... anyways, I hope y'all will be back on board._

 **Warning:** _This is where some... teenage business happens. If you don't want to read Ann and Andy being regular, hormonal teenagers together then there's about 400 words you might wanna skip._

 _Enjoy!_

* * *

The rest of the year seems so rushed for some people. They can't wait to move on to high school, so it seems, but they're stressing out over what the end of their own mini epoch means. Andy should feel the same way, what with his girlfriend in high school and everything.

That's right, Andrew Maxwell Dwyer is currently in a relationship (that's lasted, like, _two_ months) with his first girlfriend. Well, unless you count the little girls, when he was in kindergarten, that weirdos said were his girlfriends. He's pretty sure that they don't count, though.

It's weird, and that's the part that sucks the most about all of this - if any of it could be said to suck, that is. While Ann, a grade higher than him and a year older, moves into the extraordinarily _serious_ and _important_ world of high school, Andy is stuck as a little kid in middle school. Suddenly, despite Andy's baseball-driven athletic, tall, frame in comparison to Ann's relative shortness, he feels like a child more than ever before. Ann couldn't want anything to do with him now, right? Somehow, at least for a while, he ends up wrong.

While everyone else squabbles over kids quibbling with teachers about exasperating quizzes and exams, their grades, and new girlfriends (Andy included!) he has one person to worry about more than anybody else. She's just starting out in sixth grade, and it's in some way his responsibility to make sure nothing happens to her again, she's already overwhelmed by… well, everything as far as he can tell. She has problems dealing with so many new people, and Andy tries to help her any way that he can. Sometimes it's just carrying her books into homeroom the first day so that she doesn't drop everything and flee. After the bullying incident the year before, and the subsequent and sudden disappearance of the word "freak" when Andy is around, April has a bit less trouble. A bit, pointedly, because the affectionately named Janitor Jerry, the custodial manager for both their middle school and Pawnee High as it turns out, always complains that his keys are missing. Keys and/or tools. It doesn't help that Andy has doubts about a suspicious clique of girls that follow April around and don't seem particularly good friends with her, but April assures him that it's fine.

"When my Knight is around," she confides in him, "it doesn't matter how many bullies are mean to me."

But April certainly doesn't think her Knight is perfect.

Every chance that she gets, April bad mouths Ann. It's to be expected, since Andy spends one day a week hanging out with Ann instead of April. Sometimes, in these chilly nights afterwards, Andy hopes that there's no sinister curses waiting for him in bed; that no hellbeast she's summoned will destroy him in the morning. Usually, she hides her annoyance well. _Usually_.

Other times, April will openly call Ann stupid. It's a very small thing, but certainly one of the harsher things that Andy is annoyed with her over. It's a first for them, this disagreement. Everything was so simple when they were younger. _Younger_ , a funny relativism. They don't really argue, instead opting to ignore the conversation altogether. They focus on the movies they watch instead.

In this case, it's Ben's copy of _Rocky Horror Picture Show_ that they're acutely paying absolutely no attention to in the name of ignoring their mutual annoyance over something they shouldn't even care about. The movies isn't very good, in their opinions. As the tune finishes extolling the virtues of jumping and thrusting in a totally ridiculous way, like a weirdo, and even having the audacity to call it something as awesome as a _time warp,_ and all that's left is boring dialogue again, Andy glances over at April. It's a familiar position, but without Ben in the room. Hell, without either of them. The position just shocks him, and how close they are too. Thinking about Ben for more than half of a second, Andy wonders why on Earth Ann has bothered staying in the high school's comic club. Extracurriculars can't be that enticing, right? Andy tries to remember how to spell that word.

"This movie sucks," April exclaims suddenly. "I demand a new movie!"

She stares at Ben for a solid minute and a half before he gets up to avoid eye contact with her any longer. The two left on the couch can barely stifle their laughter as Ben grumbles something about dumb kid sisters and their dumb friends. Any semblance of a good mood is broken for a moment, afterwards. In the silence of April's living room, Mr. Wyatt not even in the _country_ at the time, Andy focuses instead on the zipper of his jacket. The jacket itself is a bit too small, but he likes how light it is during the chillier nights. Plus the pockets were huge. That was literally always a plus. April has her arms still crossed, but the annoyed grimace has died on her lips. She only wears a blank expression, without smile and more than a bit pensive. In many ways, Andy hates this. It's like someone's come and ripped out their tongues - and this was just because of ONE day they didn't hang out!

Eventually, April pipes up. Her voice is getting deeper, quite quickly, but right now this is different. The only other sound in the house is Ben upstairs rattling around. "So, are you still hanging out with that terrible witch tomorrow?" she asks slowly, punctuating her words with as much venom as an eleven-year old could. "Or are you gonna hang out with your friend?"

"Um, yeah I'm gonna go hang out with Ann tomorrow. It's the same night we always hang out," Andy mutters. For some reason, he feels the need to be apologetic to April. He twists the zipper of his jacket between his fingers.

"Well, I'm your _friend_ ," April bites back, but there's a sudden lack of vicious anger behind her words. Not like when the Witch-Queen of the Pawnee Forest fends off The Evil Ben's armies from invading her Goodly Home (that just totally happens to be behind her house in a clubhouse they made not _that_ long ago). There's something scary there, in her voice, and scary because it's familiar. It sinks Andy's heart deep into his chest, he knows what that is: fear. "I'm your _best_ friend," she emphasizes that word with a bitter taste in her words.

"And she's my girlfriend," Andy reminds her. His voice is weak but his grip on the zipper is far stronger.

"Your girlfriend sucks too," April whines. He has no idea what to say. April quiets for a while.

There is a long, unwelcome silence afterwards. Even upstairs, Ben is quiet. When April and Andy stop speaking, though, the shuffling and rifling around boxes resumes above them. For the first time, it seems, since Mr. Wyatt and Ben had a minor match of bullheaded arguing a few years back, Andy is uncomfortable in this place. By now his hands have formed sores shaped just like his old jacket's zipper. Andy _hates_ this. He wishes they could just talk and laugh, go back to their - April's really - fortress of solitude out back, or watch a silly movie and make fun of it for the whole length of the thing. It felt like April hated him, a familiar feeling that chills him to the bone.

Andy wishes Ben would just hurry up and pick a movie, some silly sci-fi schlockfest or a thrice-taped over rerun of _The Next Generation_. Anything would do other than this dreadful silence. His presence would mean someone to make fun of together, at the very least. Though, for some reason, Andy isn't sure April's up to doing anything like that at the moment. As if reading his mind, and just to prove him wrong, April speaks up. It's so soft, barely leaving her lips, that she sounds like the April he met on the playground five years before.

"Am I still your best friend?" shes asks in that voice, that damn voice. It's quiet, almost pathetically so.

Andy loses the fierce grip on the zipper. Her eyes are huge, more so than they already are naturally. It's also the first time Andy really _looks_ at her here, it's the first time he's studied her face recently. Where he was breaking out all over, plots of red along his nose and cheeks and neck, and the rigors of baseball practice plus the games kept his baby fat in check, April was so different. Her cheeks are still almost cherubic, and her eyes - those eyes would kill him like this, so scared - are hidden behind hair. Her hair stays straight, it stayed that way, and she rarely lets it stay short for any amount of time, quite the opposite of Andy's constantly short curls. It hides her face behind its sheen curtain. Despite this, those eyes light up her dark skin and hair. She looks as if she's hiding underneath her hair and the monochrome of her black sweater.

She looks as if she's afraid what his answer might be; she looks like more than just an answer was on the line here. Of course, there is. Not only was April asking if he cared about her, she needs to know where she is on his person social hierarchy. April needs to know where she lists between not just Ann, but also Tom. How about that guy in math who always gives him help on his homework? Did she stack up to him, or even the lunch ladies? Ann was her target for sure, but April is afraid of the possibility that she is _nowhere_ on the list. This could all be obligation to him, he guesses she thinks. And, frankly, the idea horrifies him. So, without much more of a thought, he speaks through a humorless laugh.

"Duh! Of course," and just to make sure, Andy gives her a grin. He repeats, "You are my best friend in the whole word."

"Really?"

"Really."

"How about the universe?" she asks, blinking rapidly.

"In the whole, wide galaxy," Andy reassures her.

"Good," April remarks with an easy smile. Andy ignores her wet eyes.

Andy notices Ben walk down the staircase behind them slowly, pointedly making his entrance known to them. They both look over the back of the couch. Well, Andy peers over it. April has to peek over the edge of the couch by sitting a bit on one knee to really get a good view. Ben is giving the two of them a knowing grin. Andy's learned to like Ben a bit more. It grows quite a lot, and now it seems more mutual than ever especially after the bullying incident. It's cool to have an older, smart friend.

"Guys, I've got options!" Ben announces. He holds up two movies, one in each hand. "It's either _Wrath of Khan_ -" They both groan, "Or, it's _Aliens_."

"Is that like _Alien_?" April asks.

"It's way better," Andy attests. Ben gives him a wary look. "What? It's way cooler!"

And just like that, Andy wasn't worried if April knew she was his best friend. He didn't have to, really. Now they were arguing about how awesome Lance Henriksen was, at least that's what Ben called the android dude, and how way more awesome Ripley is in the movie. April, at least, could not stop talking about how cool Ripley is, and Andy can't blame her at all.

Neither could Andy, actually, and he isn't sure if he's thinking and talking about Ellen Ripley.

* * *

The next day, as planned, Andy rides his bike on over to Eagleton just as he's done for the past few months every week. Even if he _wasn't_ going to go hang out with the prettiest girl on the planet, Andy would have liked this route for the dog count alone! There were about a dozen dogs from his house to Ann's grandparents' house alone, and he can't imagine how many more there might be if he went earlier in the day. Several of them bark curiously, quitting when Andy stops to say hello and simply remaining interested in him when he repeats this route. A couple pant their ways up to him, no fence barring the friendly pitbull with short steps and tons of slobber, or the golden retriever that nearly knocks him from his bicycle in excitement. Only one of the animals, a little chihuahua that chased him for a block, seemed at all aggressive.

The air outside is chilly, but no breeze obstructed Andy on his journey. Street lights dot the visible distance of suburbia before him, with their tiny lawns and tinier fences, that marks the rest of Eagleton's majority residential area. It's a quiet, nice place for a quiet, nice girl like Ann.

Ann didn't speak much about why she lives with her grandparents, and because she didn't bring it up Andy says nothing about it. Then again, they really didn't talk that in-depth about a whole lot. It wasn't Ann's fault, or his, since they had interests (at least, he assumes she does, but a lot of the time Ann is busy helping her grandparents around the house and trying to keep herself fit enough for a try at high school cheerleader squad) but… they just never share much of it with each other. They talk, for sure, but they mostly rode their bikes to the same park in Eagleton and relaxed until nightfall. Well after, sometimes. And it was rarely ever talking they had in mind. That's not at all a problem in Andy's eyes, though.

In truth, he never had thought about what mint breath tasted like mingled with the fragrance of mixed berries. It's pretty cool, as it turns out.

That night, though, would turn out a bit different than the past few have, for better or worse.

At the very same park as every single other time since they decided to do this, side by side on the very same bench as always, Andy finally breaks away from Ann's lips for a moment. A thought interrupts his current fixation, a horrible one. Or, at least, a thought that _should_ scare him. Something feels wrong at times, and it doesn't help that he gets a potentially very awkward boner when kissing Ann. The tongue didn't help that, either. And, damn her, her leg pushes up against his and the pressure is something Andy kind-of loses it over, hissing out his teenage weakness in such an obvious manner. These kisses have _tongue_! How is he supposed to react?

He's only human after all.

"Why'd we stop?" Ann asks, and Andy's already a little annoyed with himself at that very action.

Here he was, alone with Ann, and their hands are getting curious again with every new week. _Both_ of their hands, his and Ann's! Andy's gotten to really kiss a girl for the first time in his life, and do you think he wants to stop there when his hand is so intent on wandering? He would be legendary. Not only would he have touched a boob, but it would have belonged to Ann Perkins! Legendary doesn't even begin to describe his status already. Tom basically worships him now, and demands to know (after Andy finds out) what it feels like. With all of his bluster in mind, it's really pathetic.

"I… uh, I dunno," Andy says with a laugh.

"It was pretty fun, so…" Ann's smile is so infectious, even if his eyes are worried beyond her smile. "So let's keep going?"

"Yeah! Cool. Cool, cool…" and Andy leans in to kiss her again. By now, learning with each other, they get much better at not slamming their noses together when they try to do this. He grows impatient against denim quickly, again. His hand is adventurous, and after Ann hesitates only to nod against his lips, he cups her clothed breast. Despite the clothing, she was soft and Ann hums, more a lazy groan, when he accidentally rubs his thumb vertically across the center of her breast.

 _Holy… crap_.

But then, he couldn't get the thought of his head. Despite being in teen necking, his brain revolts. It takes him a moment to realize his zipper is undone. By _her_ hand. By now, Andy's in fantasy land. Ann's hand is cautious but definitely not stopping. He grows by the second till it's impossible for there to be more. Meanwhile, he's palming her breast like a mindless idiot. That point is not debatable.

"So…" he tries to say, fading away and reaching a new plane of existence when she curls her quite cold fingers into a fist of uncertain tightness.

The next thing Andy remembers are her cold palms, Ann wiping her hands on the grass, and holding onto her for dear life.

It takes Andy quite some time to cool down.

He asks Ann if she wants him to do anything for her, though he's really not sure where he'd even start. She blushes and shakes her head; Andy is too wiped out to insist.

In the cool air, their bikes' wheels spin idly. Andy turns to look at Ann.

Instead of insisting that he do something for her, and instead of kissing her feverishly like romance movies and those poems told him to do, he has one thought: _This isn't right_.

"Was that weird…? I mean, since I'm in middle school and you're-" he starts, but Ann cuts him off.

"Eight months older than you?" she reminds him. "Besides, I… uh-" she chuckles, "I've never done that before. It was… cool."

"Never?" Andy asks without thinking. Ann's stare, single raised eyebrow, and a scoff right his thoughts. "Oh… yeah. Duh."

"Yeah…" she smiles. Her sheepish smirk fades after a moment. They decide to go home separately not long afterwards. And it only gets more awkward, and confusing, after that night.

* * *

The next two weeks, Andy drifts from Ann. It's left unsaid, but he goes over to April's house on those days again. Their adventures on the border-woods about her place stay focused on the Knight and his Witch-Queen, but April also shifts from defending their fortress from the Evil Ben (whose armies finally fled, apparently) to improve their fortifications. However, this time it's not just them, and not Aaron or Anthony to help with construction.

Andy's seen this kid around before, and apparently April made good friends with him despite the apparent mutism.

"So, what does Orin do for fun?" Andy asks her, and Orin he guesses but the guy hasn't said a word in two hours. He finishes nailing a piece of cork board to the thin base-tree. What it would be for is anyone's guess at this point, but Andy's just about fed up with their secret hideout being given to this… newcomer.

"Staring, mostly," April says with a shrug. Orin stares into the woods. So far, that's right.

"Anything… uh, y'know, fun?" Andy asks.

"Staring _is_ fun," April insists and gives that same, noncommittal shrug. "Well, as long as you find the right person to stare at, y'know."

"How can he tell?" Andy looks at Orin. The creepy looking sixth-grader is now looking at him, staring rather.

"Oh… magic," April answers, brushing her silver-blue cloak from around her arms. She sits upon her oaken throne (that totally isn't a folding chair) and waves an arm towards Orin. "My new Court Wizard, Orin the Weird!"

Orin turns to look at her. Andy follows suit, and April gives the both of them a sly grin.

"Now, I must… um, let him into my court in a proper way. It's to make sure his magic will protect the forest," she claims. April beckons for Orin, who walks forward and instantly bows. Andy can only think that this is his job. Then April does the most bizarre thing ever, and kisses Orin's cheek.

It sends such an unusual, seemingly unwarranted surge of anger through him that Andy is nearly taken backward. Orin's face resembles a grimace, and April looks over at Andy expectantly.

His face feels warm, and her eyes drop quickly from him.

"How come I never got that?" Andy asks without thinking. Why should it matter? Why would he _want_ that anyways? This was his best friend, after all… and she shouldn't be kissing Orin.

Apparently Orin thinks this too, because he rubs his cheek and finally whispers, "I don't wanna be a wizard anymore."

He leaves without much more to say, to add to his already infinite conversation of staring, and April's chubby face is shrouded in red and her eyes grow wide again. It's a strange look on her, but she can't seem to keep her eyes from Andy.

"D-do… D'you want to be my Knight for real?" she asks, a quiet voice in the bare wooded palace-court. "I mean… you never were brought into my circle, uh, properly. Like that, I mean. Like, like… um, like-"

"Like Orin the Weird," Andy completes for her.

By now, her face is crimson.

"Yeah," she mutters.

Andy doesn't say a word, and instead walks forward and kneels in front of her. His stick-sword is drawn for him, by April, and she holds it aloft just like she saw in some of those books about England in the library. It seems regal enough, and with her witchiness and the twig itself the whole thing felt earthen enough. She clears her throat and begins:

"Now, um… Yeah, now I make you my first Knight," she says and taps the stick on his shoulder once. "You're my first Knight, and my best one. My bravest, valiant Knight!"

She shouts it aloud before standing to her full height, much less than his. April leans down and plants not one, but two soft kisses against his cheeks. One for each cheek, and when Andy looks back up at her his Witch-Queen is blushing so fiercely that she hides her face behind the silver-blue cloak again.

But, unlike the ultimately unsatisfying night a few weeks back, none of this feels wrong. None of this scene, here with April, is anything but right. His Witch-Queen's blessing, as red as it makes her seem, is just right.

* * *

 **an2:** _If_ _you enjoy this, let me know in a review. I can't let this die, but the love helps._

 _P.S. I do not endorse any opinions held by Andy or April about RHPS_


	7. Fifteen, or Recognition

**A/N:** _This is where the fun-time Andy internal war of emotions begins!_

 _Also, thank you to everyone that showed love and support for this fic despite it being ten millennia since the prior chapter :D_

 _Enjoy!_

* * *

Things could have fared worse for Andy as far as Ann is concerned. Maybe it wasn't the _best_ , but considering everything Andy isn't going to complain anytime soon. Even when it's been an overly long amount of time where neither of them say anything to each other, Andy feels better. Not _better_ in the same way as that park-night, but better about their relationship. The weird, whatever-it-was they were doing is now officially... sort-of on-hold and not strictly over.

Yeah.

The year before proved mostly disastrous for them since Andy had such a difficult time dealing with the complex emotions their first encounter stirred in him. About Ann, about himself, about... well, too many things, really. Worse, Andy realizes, would have meant something like Ann refusing to speak to him ever again and he gets away with keeping a friend afterwards. Unsurprisingly, April is thrilled with this change of heart. But, weirdly enough, Ben brings it up more than she does. With April, there's a quiet acceptance.

When she suggests they go and talk about how lame her teachers are in the Fortress of Solitude, April doesn't say a word of Ann. It's refreshing, the old-school feel of talking about pranks and which teachers deserve them the most.

"They're all the pits," April admonishes him for suggesting some of the teachers _aren't_ terrible.

"Ms. Knope is cool!" Andy says, defending the exuberant teacher's aide.

"Well, she doesn't count," April remarks.

"Totally does."

"Nuh uh, she's an assistant!"

"Which is like a teacher, but way less annoying," Andy suggests. April mulls it over for a second before reluctantly agreeing.

Still, April deems the Ann-less life to be good news. He would almost say she's ecstatic, an adjective he either would never have come up with or, equally as likely, he wouldn't ever use to describe April. Even though he's spending every night now hanging out with her, watching TV or coloring because it's just an old habit that refuses to die (plus, April's starting to get incredibly good at what was formerly messy doodling). Still, she acts like the one day difference is everything to her. Ecstatic is the perfect word, then.

There's still some left over strange aura over them, an odd reluctance to hang out after the proper "knighting" he'd received. However, their friendship returns to normal relatively quickly again. Again, they color like they're in elementary school. April fails miserably to hide her smirking face when she draws, and Andy finds himself compelled to watch her draw. Things return to normal wholly, including April's father.

Gone are the seemingly weekly business excursions of the years just past, and it drains for a bit. The frequent nights Andy, April, and even sometimes Ben enjoy slow down to a crawl, and the unusually gruff man would do the least subtle sizing up of Andy possible. His eyes burn into Andy whenever Mr. Wyatt stares at him for too long. Suspicion seems everywhere around Mr. Wyatt, and as a fifteen-year old boy explicitly _wanting_ to hang out with his twelve-year old daughter, Andy kind-of understands. Then again, when he thinks about it, what is there to understand? It's not like Andy has a crush on April or anything! They're just friends. Nothing would happen. Andy is _certain_ of that.

"Mr. Wyatt, you totally have nothing to worry about! I swear." Andy tries to reassure the cantankerous old man when he questions why Andy and April are sitting on the same couch, watching TV together. They're obviously too close. Their hands could touch, not that Andy wants them to touch. "We're just-"

"Watching TV," April buts in, sneaking up on the two of them in the kitchen. "Seriously, dad?"

"What? Andy is a teenage boy and I'm only watching out for you. I care about you-"

"Since when?" April asks quite clearly without thinking about her words. Mr. Wyatt only purses his lips in response. "Dad, I'm sorry it's just... he's just..." April gives Andy a brief glance, averting her eyes when he meets her look. She continues slowly, quietly, "We're just hanging out. We're just... friends."

"So, there's uh... no funny business?" Mr. Wyatt asks this, making sure to look Andy in the eyes when he asks that question. His eyes seem to cut through Andy, pick at him and try to search for the truth.

"No, sir," Andy answers. He tries to sound firm and responsible, but the crack in his voice when he speaks only serves to make April laugh.

Mr. Wyatt is too busy looking Andy, really trying to gauge this boy he's known for almost six years while they speak a little more, to notice April creep behind her him. While Mr. Wyatt squints and grunts his questions, April busies herself pantomiming him and copying what she thinks he looks like. Her posture and that one squinty eye are perfect. When Mr. Wyatt quiets, finally, April slams her arms over her chest in an exaggerated slap, quirks one eye like she just had a clot of dirt chucked into it, pouts her lips, and gives Andy - over her father's shoulder about two feet behind him because she's not a lunatic - that single, bulging stink-eye. Andy tries to maintain composure, to show Mr. Wyatt he's serious, but he can't help himself. He laughs openly at Mr. Wyatt's surly demeanor (both the real one and the Daughter-Clone one).

Andy's pretty sure a vein pops in Mr. Wyatt's neck just then. It doesn't help that, barely a second after Andy bursts out laughing, April cracks up into a fit of dark chuckling as well. Just as Andy's ribs start hurting, and after April drops to the floor to hold her stomach and roll around dramatically, he suddenly wonders if laughing at April's grumpy father who rarely shows anything resembling kindness, happiness, or even humanity just _might_ not be the best idea he's ever had.

But then, the unthinkable happens.

Mr. Wyatt's face loses its reddish-purple discoloration slowly but surely. While April watches, a bit wary and likely fear in her sentinel-wide eyes, Mr. Wyatt walks over to Andy and gives him a firm pat on the shoulder.

And he, in Mr. Wyatt's case almost quite literally, cracks a smile.

* * *

Again, Andy has no idea how his relationship - is that even what he should call it? - is going on or why he even bothers anymore. He doesn't think the sun shines out of Ann's butt anymore, but she's still nice, quiet Ann. Nice, quiet Ann with very cold palms. Ann invites him over to her house one day, seemingly out of the blue, and he almost rejects her invitation altogether.

"My gran's out visiting family so... I, um, thought you might wanna hang out?" she says when he arrives, for some reason defending herself when he's in her living room already.

"Oh yeah, sure... um, why didn't you, uh, go?" he asks, unsure. They never really talked about her home-life that often.

"Well, I usually always go. But, I dunno, something is..." Ann gives him a look, almost pensive, before smiling. "Something's different."

He might not really have an emotion either way about her, other than that she is awesome, but her smile is still infectious and pretty. He scratches the back of his neck and looks around awkwardly. They're not even sitting on the same couch. It feels like therapy to him.

"Hey, that's cool-"

"I always go, but she didn't really seem to care and pa goes anyways just because he's bored all of the time. It's fine, right? I mean, I'm not being rude?" she asks him in her nicely air-conditioned living room.

 _April's house is air-conditioned too_ , he thinks without really wanting to at all.

Instead, he manages to actually say something to Ann. "Oh... well, yeah. I mean, no. You're just... y'know, you're just totally cool and nice and you feel bad because you feel like you let them down or something," he says in one long breath. After a shrug, he adds, "I guess."

Andy intended to use that line, or something similar, to get a pretty easy escape card since Ann would likely say that's sweet and that she wants to stay in, or whatever. In fact, he sort-of wants to break up whatever-it-is that they might be doing, even now. Even then, in ten minutes' time when she's rooting around for something in her bedroom. Ann never gives him the chance. Instead of leaving, Andy spends the night.

The next morning, Andy scrambles out of Ann's bed. He ignores her calls, and pretends not to exist around her for a while, and they stop talking altogether for the rest of the year.

* * *

Noticing that Andy is bored just a bit more, that bit that liked Ann at least, and though they wouldn't call it as such there was is a sort of sadness, Aaron offers to teach Andy how to play guitar. There were so many times Andy was clearly jealous of his brother's skill, but he never wants to put the time or effort in to learn something that seems so complicated. It's even worse that Aaron makes it all look simple, but Andy knows better. Things seem a bit different now. Andy takes him up on the offer.

They start with toughening up Andy's fingers. The two of them sit on Aaron's bed and go through some basic motions and posture stuff that seems dull as all hell. Aaron's ease on the fretboard only lights that jealousy up again, but it's also super clear how hard this all is. The nylon strings of the acoustic guitar bite into his fingertips.

"Ow!" Andy yelps, putting his left index fingertip in his mouth after shaking his hand around. "That hurts, dude."

"Told ya," Aaron shrugs and strums a random progression of chords while Andy's finger recovers. "You just gotta get some calluses first. After that, it's all smooth sailing. Just gotta play some chords and everyone'll flock to ya."

"How long is that gonna take?" Andy whines, trying to press the strings down again. The bit of work on April's clubhouse-slash-Fortress helps here, but only a little. He can't maintain the pressure for any time at all. Andy stares down at his brother's guitar. It seems so small. "This is super hard."

"Yup," Aaron agrees, still strumming. "But... the chicks love it."

"Really?" Andy asks, cautious and with wide eyes.

"Oh yeah, everybody loves it. Everyone digs a guy who plays guitar," Aaron claims. Andy isn't so sure about that, though. Another one of April's small entourage of friends, Derek, brought his guitar to school at the end of the year prior and walked around playing it everywhere. Derek could barely play the one song he clearly worked on all the time. April thought it was cool. "Especially weird goth girls."

"Okay..." Andy doesn't think about how he's just _now_ asking Aaron to teach him. Just after Derek impressed April.

Derek, whom Andy never saw her really talk to but for some reason Andy feels a pang of jealousy when he thinks about them. _Them_ , the word is striking but not unusual. He's her friend, so of course they hang out. But they don't really talk, and April only ever seems to call the guy lame. Still, Andy can't shake the feeling even as Aaron stares at him incredulously.

"Y'know, emo chicks who like weird indie music and never wear a color in their life...? Short ones that live just down the block," Aaron says, laughing. Andy shakes his head at his brother's silly joke but there's a bit of hesitation to it this time. "Dude, c'mon! April will be so into this."

"Okay? Wait... April is just... we're just, y'know," Andy sputters and Aaron's smile is so damnably annoying that Andy wants to run away. "She's just my friend. We're just friends, okay?"

"That you totally wanna make out with," Aaron says matter-of-factly. Normally when Aaron teases Andy about April, he makes gross kissing noises and laughs and it's so clear that it's a joke. Right now though, he sounds completely serious in a way Andy's never really heard from his brother. "C'mon. Seriously, bro, you can talk about this kinda stuff with me. We're brothers and your best friend is a girl you think is super cute. And you're, what, thirty now?"

"Fifteen," Andy corrects him with a sheepish smile. Despite all of his brothers being taller than him Andy still towers over his classmates and the athletic figure - thank you high school baseball - only improves the impressive stature he's building. It sure beats chubby Andy, his teenaged brain thinks. "She's twelve, though... y'know? That's... um, yeah. That's really weird. I can't like her."

"So you admit you like her," Aaron says and whistles loudly. He strums muted strings on his guitar once and grins wide. Andy knows what this means, and suddenly wishes this brotherly love moment would end.

"No-"

Aaron breaks into song at his request. "Andy likes a girl and her name is April _na na nana_ ," he starts, strumming along and with a sort-of cracked melody that just makes Andy groan. He hates this already.

After a minute more of nonsense rhythms and lyrics, mindless strumming and more, Andy's face turns red hot. Aaron finally gives up when he sees his brother so bothered by this bizarre ballad. Andy's fingers are still sore when he tries to copy his brother again. It's frustrating, and they're dulled from the pain by now, but he can at least hold a note for a second longer. Progress!

"I'm serious dude, it's okay if you like her..."

"But she's super, super, _super_ young," Andy mutters, unsure where this sudden feeling came from along with the confession. It's veiled, however thinly. The feeling of strange, but not unwelcome yearning returns again and he lingers around its weight. For what, or whom, this yearning Andy won't know for years to come. Then it'll be clear as day, as obvious as light poking between rail-thin trees poking at the feet of the clouds above.

As obvious as a few minutes' travel down the block, as obvious as that. Obvious, and clear to everyone but him. But them.

"Man, it's only a few years," Aaron tries to calm him down, but Andy's struck by this epiphany and can't escape it for now.

These feelings, ever since his night in the park with Ann, come into startling clarity in the bedroom at home. Not at that park, or later on the couch in front of _Aliens_ , but here in relative solitude. Inside of Andy's confession, it opens its waiting maw. His neighbor, his Witch-Queen, his best friend in every universe possible all together at the same time and then one more. Andy understands this sensation of warmth, this butterfly's weight inside of his lungs that expands further. They were the ones he thought he should direct towards Ann Perkins, but now he has to come to terms with the reality of them. They weren't for Ann's eyes, for her heart.

April, his friend - his very _young_ friend - doesn't even know that he's sitting in his bedroom, with his brother and reorganizing all of his thoughts and feelings that he had tried to repress. The couches, the looks... the cartoons, and the coloring, and the sleepovers. They all hit him like a fifty-ton hammer aimed for his heart.

"Andy?" his brother's voice interrupts the reverie just long enough for Andy to come back to Earth. "Yo, Andy. Dude, you spaced out there for a second. You okay?"

"Sorry, uh, um... yeah, she's just," Andy takes a deep breath and tries to stopper this flood of realizations. "Aaron, she's just way too young." Andy doesn't stop to think what he's admitting to his brother. It must be so obvious to him, and yet Andy clings to the idea that maybe some people _don't_ know. Maybe that sect exists somewhere.

Probably not.

"Yeah, and she'll be what... thirty when you're thirty-three! That's nothing, man," he argues. It's a fair point, but there's a flaw somewhere. Andy's sure of it. He has to be. This can't be real, he can't be allowed to like his best friend.

He figures it out.

"But she's twelve _now_!" Andy cries out. Maybe it isn't a crush, because the idea of dating a twelve-year old is creepy and weird. And, yet, it's April. Her weird, deep voice and her girlish bangs and her black sneakers... It's weird, but it's April. "That's just... weird..."

"Give it time, man," Aaron advises him. His voice is the most sincere it's likely ever been. Not just towards Andy, but literally to anybody. "Wait it out... y'know, just-"

"That's creepy too... that's weirder," Andy sighs. "You know what, I just wanna play some guitar okay?"

Andy sets about training his fingertips again, hunching over the fretboard and ignoring his brother for a minute. Waiting it out sounds like he has _plans_ for April. That right there might be the weirdest thing he's ever heard, and hopes his brother isn't serious. It sounds just ultra-mega-atomic creeper status, and Andy wants to just have a crush. A crush that will go away and they can be friends forever. Forever would be enough, but what if that wasn't all? What if friends forever was the minor arc to their conclusion?

He stops thinking about that, or tries.

Aaron doesn't say another word about anything they just talked about for the rest of the night. They focus instead on guitar, and their shared love of music. He shows Andy how to hold the guitar by the neck without tiring his thumb if he just rests it _behind_ the fretboard. Andy asks him to show how to play some Zeppelin songs because, frankly, when he thinks of guitar music that's his first thought. That and the strange demo tapes that his friend Burly listens to all the time. He says they're from the West Coast but doesn't explain much more.

After Andy sees how complex something like "Stairway" is, they both agree to wait on learning that one later. It never sounded complicated when Andy listened to the song, but then again he realizes that he never really listened to those songs like that. It was mostly because of the cool singer. Aaron shows him the bassline on guitar for "Since I've Been Lovin' You," the one that their mom loves so much, and Andy manages to stay in rhythm for a bit before losing his way.

They try and try again, and Andy does his best to memorize the pattern but it's the rhythm and pain in his fingers that kills him. Aaron eventually tires of the song, but they decide to reconvene later and Andy can practice some more.

Later that night, Andy listens to the bootleg copy of his favorite songs. He switches to that same one, that Zeppelin ballad, over and over again. He embeds the song into him as best he can. For the first time, he really thinks about the lyrics and the way they evoke recently uncovered truths.

* * *

Andy tries to learn that song over the course of a month, oh he tries his damnedest to earn the right to play that Zeppelin ballad.

His fingers fight him every single step of the way, and he's playing on old strings on an acoustic, but it feels so good when he can find that chord shape that bugs him so much. He invites April over one misty morning, a short hop from her house to his, and April sneaks her way into his house.

His mother would never make a fuss about this, anyways. Having to feed two fewer boys means that something like surprise visits from April are easily handled. Every day, Andy tells her that he's going to get a job and help around the house. His mom almost cried the first time he said that, and every time after that she just laughs and waves him off. It's like she doesn't believe him. Andy will prove her wrong, but first he has to be able to play this song for April.

When she walks into his room, Andy's sitting on the bottom bunk bed with the guitar in his lap.

April arrives in her black jacket, a jingling of beads around her wrist following her inside, and her same, black sneakers. Her eyes widen at the object in his hands.

"Dude," she whispers.

"I've been learning," Andy says proudly. He strums quietly, a chord he learned from the song that's so easy to play now because it's mostly all the strings open and without having to press down on that damn fretboard. "I mean... I'm still really bad, but-"

"Can I hear?" she asks instantly, and the excitement in her voice is only matched by past April's enthusiasm about Andy leaving Ann. "If you wanna, I mean. You don't have to play anything I just thought..."

"Yeah, totally!" Andy feels that swell in his chest that means all of his body is turning into a furnace of joy. Unlike the lyrics, the one's he's parsing every day to try and figure out if they really apply to her, are wrong.

She hasn't given up on him, and he hasn't given up on her.

April drops to the floor and sits with her legs crisscrossed. She stares up at him, expectant. For the first time, his Witch-Queen stares up at him like he's everything. Something so simple, and honestly really fun now that Andy's got a few weeks under his belt, catches her attention. Her young age don't scare him anymore, because he's never felt better than when he's basking in her approval like this. Remembering that he actually has to do something, Andy starts.

He flubs the opening solo like always, but April's eyes are so wide when he bends the strings and they don't break.

He screws up a chord change and doesn't leave the strings open for an arpeggio, but April's mouth hangs open like he's just written the most beautiful melody just for her.

He fails to finish the song, but April claps loudly for him as if he's just performed for ten thousand people.

He can't play guitar at all yet, but he can play that one song. He can play this song, and look back on this day as the day that he formally told April, through the music of his weak fingers and wobbly rhythms, that this was the day since he'd been loving her.

* * *

 **an2:** _Thank you for reading, and for the general awesomeness of caring even a little! Thank you, thank you, thank you!_

 _P.S. Zeppelin informs a lot of my fic titles. I thought they deserved a better spotlight than the name of a collection of porn fics :D_


	8. Sixteen, or a Longing Worth Enduring

**A/N:** _Thank you all for reading! You're all true jewels. This chapter is less "actiony" as far as the mild events in my fics can be called action or anything, really, but we need some ramp.  
_

 _Next chapter, everything goes crazy! I promise. I have a plan, I swear._

 _Enjoy :)_

* * *

In Andy's limited experience, and honestly limited might be a bit of an understatement, there's nothing quite like the open road.

Well, the open road of Pawnee at the very least. With his mother in the passenger seat. Anyways, the sky above pale Indiana stretches basically forever. It opens infinitely forward, except infinity in this case is precisely from his house to the grocery store. But still, it opens up for quite a while. Practically forever, as far as he's concerned. That maw of a sky just vomits forth three-point-two miles of impossibly beautiful road. However, ever since he started to learn to drive things have been changing. The world expands around Andy, a prospect of more than just his small town around him.

It'll take a while for that to really sink in, and for Andy to regret it. But now? Now he can _anywhere_ (assuming his mother is there with him).

Just a few minutes out from their house, Andy spies a drive-in theater that he never really paid attention to before. With a car, or at least the ability to drive, the thing seems less mystical and more... attainable. Like it's a reachable goal. For some reason the place is still up and running, but Andy goes back to focusing on the road.

"You don't have the right-of-way, hon," his mother pipes up a bit later without looking up from her book to remind him that he can't go wherever he wants _literally_. It's weird. Driving almost seems fun to Andy. Still, his mother shakes her head lightly. "Just let them turn and... now you're good."

"Thanks mom," he remarks with his eyes still glued to the road in case of any surprises. Thankfully, though, his obsession with pointing out everything and anything when he was younger is paying off in spades. "So, uh, how long until I can drive by myself? A week? Tomorrow?"

"Still got two more months, Andy," she reminds him and, without looking up she says, louder, "No rolling stops."

Everything in his mom's old Toyota clambers to a rickety halt at the intersection. Two more months. Two months until his true freedom, and everything that was awesome about being alone, listening to his music, and going anywhere he wants. Even now, Andy's got the jitters about being able to drive! It wasn't something he really thought of before, especially since driving was always something his mom and brothers did.

After a few more blocks, Andy and his mother manage to make it to the grocery store without even one scratch this time. That's already an improvement over the last time, and Andy counts it as a victory. Then again, that curb totally came out of nowhere last time, so Andy doesn't know what his mom wants from him.

Everything inside is the same, and boring, except a sign at one of the registers that catches his eye.

The same, old guy at the deli greets them with a smile and a kind word to his mother about her hair that day. She smiles and buys a different cold cut lunch meat, but it's only different in the cycles rather than it truly being something new for them. They switched between getting ham one month, then turkey, then chicken breast... it usually cycled like that. Then they'd repeat, and get tired of the same stuff over time just as often.

Shopping is excruciating, but Andy does his work lifting and moving everything.

"So," his mom starts, peering at the backs of soup cans. Then at the weight, then the price. She unfolds a list and looks at the prices of everything already in the cart. "What's the first thing you want to do when you get your license?"

He didn't have to give that one much thought before answering. "I wanna get a job." Andy picks out the can of tomato sauce they always get. "I mean, other than mowing lawns. Which is awesome, but..."

"A real job, you mean?" She gives him a quick smile and her short, breathy laugh. They slowly wander over to the pasta and rice aisle. There's a deal on the store-brand spaghetti so his mom goes to get as many as they budget allows. There's nothing more malleable than pasta. "C'mon, hon. You don't have to get a job. You don't have to get a job that you don't want. You can just keep mowing lawns and pay for gas..."

"Yeah, but I saw a sign out here when we came in," he says as their cart rattles down the aisle. "I, uh, it'd be cool to buy gas and other stuff, y'know. Maybe I could help around the house? Buy groceries, or something... I dunno."

To be honest, that is only part of the reason he wants a job. The other is, of course, buying things he'd like to have such as new strings because dear God, Aaron's old guitar hasn't had a change in probably two years. It starts to really wear on him sometimes, but Andy doesn't bother asking his mom to let him skip buying gas once to get some strings.

Don't get any of that wrong though, ever since he was a kid Andy always promised to take of his mother and make sure she never worried about money ever again. It was a loose, childish promise, but Andy wants to keep it. Mowing lawns helps a little bit - he has cash to buy lunches whenever he wants something a yellow punch card won't get him and if he saves the leftover change for a few weeks, he can go to a yard sale and buy old Super Nintendo games nobody wants - but Andy hates watching his mom have to budget for him, the brothers still at home, and herself. Usually at expense to herself. Even if she did get a promotion at work, earning hugs from the boys and eliciting a pizza party in celebration, money is tighter than ever.

"Andy, I never made Aaron or Anthony or any of your other brothers jet a job to help out. If you want a job, that is fine, but if you don't then-"

"But they wanna go to college, mom," he interrupts to try and explain to her but Andy already knows his mistake.

"Don't interrupt people, Andrew! It is rude," she scolds him. By now, they're almost checked out. Just milk to grab and then they can leave. Andy can drive a little bit more, this time with a bit more weight behind him. "Besides, don't you want to go to school too?"

"Sorry," Andy grumbles. He carries the gallon of milk to the registers. The store is almost empty for once, and the quiet is nice if strange. His mother seems happy that there's no one to wait behind this time. "And I dunno, I haven't really thought about it. I dunno. No? Probably not... maybe."

"That's fine, dear-"

"That'll be sixty-seven fifty," the older woman cashier butts in. This is a scenario where interrupting his mother is okay. Andy looks at his mother quickly, who shrugs. So he asks the cashier:

"Hey, I saw you're looking for help. Like, to work y'know? What jobs are open?"

* * *

"Dude, that is awesome!" Andy shouts into the brisk Pawnee air, pointing down at a hole in the ground.

The recently unearthed pit underneath a rotten log swarms with creepy crawlies of all kinds. He points at the, at least until recently, interred creatures with a grin. In April's backyard, they had some renovating to do at the Fortress. The old rug that lay spread out on the ground needs shaking down, and frankly a proper cleaning, but that's to be expected when the ground is carved with roots all over and the general presence of the scurrying bugs, not to mention how scarred it is by the trampling of bare feet. The poor thing is scarred, just like the misshapen twig he has in his hand to move things around more easily.

Scarred, just like April's look of horror is when several large spiders come skittering out of that very hole.

"Andy..." she whispers from behind him.

"Huh?"

Only when April starts speaking again does Andy realize that she's behind him, holding onto his shoulder for dear life. If it wasn't for her nails digging into his shoulder, and the irony of April Wyatt scared of spiders, this would be hysterical. Instead, it's kind-of freaky.

"Kill it," she whispers.

"It? There's a ton!" Andy pokes around with a twig. Insects and spiders scurry about, trying to avoid the tip of the twig smashing into the earth.

"Then kill all of them!" she yelps.

"Whatever happened to Miss Forest Queen?" Andy jokes, still not quite grokking the weight of the situation at hand. For now, it's just kind-of-funny.

If he had, he might have noticed April's usually tawny beige skin turn as white as physically possible. Or, even, the clammy sweat building and her eyes bulging out like angry, white stars. The nails in his skin are obvious enough, but the tell-tale colored banshee somehow slipped his catch here. It's utterly crazy, but Andy for... well, for once he's out of the loop on April. It's strange.

"Andy, I am being one hundred percent serious," she gives in a terrible whisper. It's starting to dawn on him.

"Me too, I-"

"Please, just do it!"

So Andy, after a vigorous nod of April's head when he turns to look at her, smashes a few spiders with his twig until the now extreme pressure in his shoulders gives way and April lets go of him. Eventually, after he fills the hole with some fresh dirt and sets rug back in place, she calms down. Squatting down on the newly cleaned rug, Andy drags the freshly stringed, recently tuned guitar into his lap.

The first chord that he plays is dreamy, crystalline in attack but full in body - sharp and strong - and smooth on the ears, a little thump to it, to the point that it almost sounds like an album track. It's healthy and heavy, and Andy's in love with the sound. By the way that April's reacting, seeming to calm down and watch his every move, it's working for her too. That's the part that makes him happy, really. Not the fact that it sounds much better now, but that April is simply calmer around it.

She sets about adjusting her Throne, that totally isn't a chair, while Andy warms up. He tries out something he's been working on, just a simple little number with no frills, and April stops in her tracks a moment before resuming her previous work with a small smile. Most of it is improv at this point, but it's fun with inspiration and gauging her reaction to the song.

"What was that?" April asks him eventually after she sits down in her throne and picks at the loose thread of her sweater.

"I could ask you the same thing," he replies. April chuckles. "Seriously! Are you, um... y'know, good?"

"I don't like spiders, obviously," she mumbles. When Andy nods his head, ready to accept that as enough, she continues, "They're weird and come out of nowhere and get caught in my hair and they're weird and gross."

"And weird?" Andy asks, grinning from ear to ear.

"Totally weird," she answers.

"I think it's kinda funny that the girl who wears a beetle around her neck is afraid of spiders," he says, glancing at the necklace around her throat. After his third mowed lawn, Andy invited April to go to the local flea market with him on a supposed whim.

* * *

 _Earlier._

He hopes that she would see something ultra expensive, to fit his fifty dollar budget at least, that she liked and thought was awesome so that he could awe her with his impressive purchase later. In hindsight, this is a terrible idea. But, still, that burgeoning torrent of _thought_ that keeps threatening to stab into his mind drives that plan.

Dumb kids.

Throughout the day, she never looks at the local amateur jeweler's works. In all fairness to April, the Pawnee local "jeweler" at a flea market is more likely to be a thief with no fence. So they pass him several times, Andy hopeful, and she never seems too interested in anything other than the myriad keys on the guy's bracelet. He refuses to sell those, despite how lucrative fifty bucks seems.

Instead, she returns over and over again to the stand of a guy who claims to be a metalworker. Whether that drove her or not, Andy isn't sure. But one object is clearly her goal.

This was his press, and unlike the scrawny burglar hocking stolen goods Andy wants to believe him. At least he looks the part: a bristly, thick moustache and broad shoulders all set to a stocky, heavy frame. The object of April's affection, a golden chain with a brass beetle attached at the throat on a pivot point, is going for exactly one hundred dollars.

Exactly twice his budget.

April never says anything, but Andy can tell she likes it. So could the craftsman, whose name Andy learns is Ron, and beckons Andy back to the stand after a moment.

"Is she your sister?" Ron asks him after Andy makes another round trip while April uses the bathroom.

"Nah," Andy says, shaking his head. Scanning the items for sale, he notices something is wrong. "Hey, where's-"

"This?" Ron holds up the necklace. Andy nods slowly.

"Son, I believe in the honest price. A fair deal, if you will." He grins to himself, but Andy has no idea why that is supposed to be funny. Ron goes back to his stoic, even face and continues after clearing his throat. "Anyhow, I believe in asking for what's fair."

"Okay..."

"Do you think one hundred dollars is fair, Andrew?"

Andy pauses. He thinks for a second, and nods after a moment. "Yes," he answers.

"Really?"

"Um... y-yeah, sure. Yeah," Andy answers cautiously. This is too weird to answer in any way but with honesty.

"Huh," Ron mutters and shakes his head with, based on the shifting facial hair, what looks to be a smile. "Well son, I don't think the market is particularly interested in this good. That's fine, I was being a little too artistic that day. I should either give up on this endeavor, or accept what little compensation is available lest I fall victim to overvaluing my inventory."

"What?"

"Point is, she likes it, correct?" Ron asks him.

"Yeah, she does," Andy mumbles. "I only have fifty bucks, though."

The sounds of the flea market are their only companions for a short while. People pass by and he's sure April should be back by now, but he's still standing here waiting for this weird guy to stop talking to him. If Andy wasn't the same height as Ron, he might be scared. Instead, he waits.

"Another thing I believe," Ron says, "is this wonderful thing called foolhardy, young love."

* * *

"Yeah, well, it isn't funny," April in the present warns him, still spinning her brass beetle. "At all."

"Okay, okay. Sorry. I didn't know," Andy says and raises his hands defensively. He's being honest. He didn't know, and now regrets what he was potentially going to do back there.

"It's fine," April mutters. "Sorry."

"For what?"

"Being rude," April says as if it's obvious and not sort-of silly of her to say.

"Nah, it's cool. You don't have to be sorry, dude," Andy says with a wide grin. "I was being a jerk. The _real_ rude jerk."

"Jerk," April repeats. The tone in her voice is completely different from her wicked smirk, and he doesn't fall for it one bit. Instead, they lock eyes for a half-moment and Andy's face burns in response.

"Speaking of jerks, how's Knope's history class? Is she a cool teacher?" Andy asks her, changing the subject as quickly as he can. Miss Knope was hired by the Pawnee school district to work at both the middle and high schools, just as she did while tutoring and acting as a teacher's aide. She teaches the junior year world history class that Andy would be taking next year. "I gotta know if she's a cool teacher."

"Ugh." April groans loudly. "She's fine I guess, but lately been saying stupid stuff. Like, y'know, that I have-" April does little air quotes with her fingers, "Potential. Ugh."

"Ew!" Andy laughs.

"Exactly," April whines. She reaches beside her throne and pulls out a small bunch of markers and a paper pad.

Without the coloring books to keep them busy, April finds a little solace in sketching. Nothing serious, and certainly nothing of solid form, but it's cool. Her pictures are still amazing to Andy, because somehow he always sees something in them despite the only shape they have being a wobbly mess. She flips open to a random page, scribbles a few random things that Andy cannot see. "She's not the worst, though. Fun teacher when she's not saying lame things like that."

"Oh, guess who I found out is my metal shop teacher?"

"Who? Satan?" April asks in mock excitement.

"Remember the guy I bought your necklace from?" Andy asks her, a smile still on his face.

"Yeah...? That Ron guy, right?" Then it seems to hit her. "Wait, really?"

"Yeah! It's awesome," Andy regales her then with the stories of awesome Ron Swanson and his awesome shop class while continually, intermittently, playing his guitar for their courtly audience of trees and April.

* * *

A few days later, Andy almost cuts his finger off in shop through a plain accident.

Maybe it was Ann confronting him randomly in the hallway, asking why he never called her back. That was extremely awkward, and Andy still isn't sure how he can make it up to Ann. She seemed genuinely upset, and part of Andy wishes he could have explained to her what he was really feeling, and not hurt her feelings by saying that he was taking out latent emotions over somebody else.

Maybe it was Ron Swanson demanding that Andy can do better work, or even the prospect of the looming license examination in a few weeks.

Even so, his finger was totally almost _gone_ for good.

April might have thought it was gross and cool when he told her later, but in the moment it is terrifying. That quick _shear_ of a blade capable of cutting metal at high speeds rakes past his skin and barely nicks him. He's too lucky. While Mr. Swanson writes up his extensive hall pass - new bureaucratic bullcrap according to him - a classmate Andy talks to occasionally chats him up while his finger bleeds a fair bit into a rag.

"Man, that would've sucked," the classmate says with a less-than-enthused tone of voice that he always seems to have. "If you take a million years, I'll try and save you a spot at lunch."

"Sure woulda. Thanks, Burly." Andy sighs. "I'm just happy I don't have to quit playing guitar. That's literally all I was thinking about, man."

Something seems to click for Burly, who smiles wide. It's probably the first time that Andy's ever seen him actually smile the whole time he's known the guy. "Dude, you play?" he asks.

"Uh... yeah, sure do," Andy says with a chuckle. He shrugs after, not sure what else there is to say on the topic. Really, there isn't much.

"We should jam some time. I mean, we should play or something. I know a guy who plays the drums."

"You play?"

"Guitar," Burly answers.

"Dude! Sweet," Andy raises his hand for a high five but is thankfully stopped by Mr. Swanson handing him the pass to go see the nurse. There was also Burly's grimace to stop him, or at least alert him that something was wrong, but hey - at least there was something.

* * *

The first thing Andy does with his newly minted driver's license, two months after that grocery trip, is to keep his end of the bargain up.

Sadly, working at a grocery store is boring as all hell. It probably doesn't help that Andy only stocks shelves, in the back and front. Still, it's fun exercise and they don't really notice if a bag of chips goes missing here and there. Or, at least, they don't say anything. Plus, he gets to eat at the deli for free and the kindly old man makes him a sandwich and another to bring home for his mom. It's not so bad, plus working part-time means that he gets to avoid the crazy shenanigans outside when rush hour hits.

But then, then the first thing he does with his _paycheck_ is what matters. He buys enough gas to fill his mom's car up, and gets half of the groceries that week. Squirreling away what's left, Andy takes a small sum out for himself.

"Hey, April, uh... yeah, so hi," he stammers over the phone. This shouldn't be so hard. It _shouldn't_. They were friends, and this was friendly. As friendly as his frankly foul thoughts can be sometimes, especially at night. Teenage boys are the worst, Andy's subconscious screams. "So, uh, I have my mom's car tonight and there's that new slasher movie you wanted to see-"

" _Dead Freaks 9: The Re-Deadening?_ " She recites, just as she did the time he took her past the drive-in to go get something to eat. "Uh, yeah. That sounds cool. When?"

"Tonight?" Andy asks, recognizing that she's probably busy doing... something. He's unsure what a thirteen-year old is doing that is cooler than a slasher flick they can sneak into, but still.

"Um, can you get me in?" she wonders, sounding nervous over the phone.

"Either that or we sneak in," Andy offers.

As it turns out, the guy working the tickets really doesn't give a shit. Either he wants to be fired, or Andy doesn't know what, but the end result is the same: sitting back in his mom's beat up Toyota with gratuitous violence and over-the-top gonzo horror in front of their faces. Andy debates sneaking a peek at April when the usual nudity pops up. He feels a faint, familiar stirring, but he's also a teenage boy that's seeing a pair of breasts fighting every bit of gravity any normal human has to deal with.

Andy does sneak a peek, and feels _tremendously_ terrible about it.

He's not blind, and he's not an idiot. April is flatter than most girls, and definitely Ann. The comparison disgusts him, but then again he's checking out a child. The chill that runs through him at the thought, and April's quick look that must have caught him, erodes whatever was building. Instead, he watches the zombies gnaw at virgins smoking pot or whatever the hell the stupid movie is about. How there were _nine_ of these things, he isn't sure.

"Want some popcorn?" he offers, shuffling the other bag he bought specifically because he knew that he'd eat a whole one by himself.

"Meh. Got any Sour Patch Kids?" she asks without looking, still reaching over to grab a handful of buttery corn.

"Duh, do you think I never met you?" he says in mock offense and tosses the box into her lap.

"Score," she says with a laugh and rips open the box. "You want some?"

"A fair trade's a fair trade," Andy agrees and after she takes another handful of popcorn he grabs a few of the green candies.

"Hey, those are the best ones!" she complains.

"You snooze, you lose Wyatt," he laughs and pops one in his mouth.

"Well, fine then, I'll just-" April grabs his bag of popcorn and sets between her legs. "This is mine now."

"Rude!" he says and grins at her. He doesn't really care, his stomach hurts a little and he's already had more than his share of popcorn. "I mean, could I have a little?" he asks anyways, pretending to be asking for forgiveness.

"Only if I get _one_ of the green ones back," she offers. He only took three or four, and the rest of the box was surprisingly green-heavy.

"Deal!"

They exchange again, and by this time someone else has died in the movie. Just as April turns to watch the movie, another mess of gore splashes onto the screen, and she shouts an excited yell at the gruesome sight. She jumps in the passenger seat a half-inch when a surprise jump scare ends the movie ten minutes later, after they've had their fun, and April turns to look at him with a wild grin. Something in _that_ , the pure elation, is powerful to him. Maybe it's too much, or maybe he wasn't expecting it, but when they catch each others' gaze and they don't look away, Andy thinks about kissing her.

It's not even hidden by any tempting thoughts of otherwise, he simply wants to kiss April Wyatt.

Something in her face, too, is different. That gleeful smile at the abomination they aren't looking at fades a bit, but her eyes stay locked on his. She blinks rapidly, and he thinks he catches her eyes flicker somewhere else. He hopes it isn't too far down.

That flair of deep red prickles against the dimples of her cheeks, but Andy barely notices that in the half-light. A wretched scream from the movie almost interrupts this gaze, but Andy doesn't look away. Eventually, April coughs loudly and takes a deep breath. Andy cannot.

"Dude, are you okay?" she asks, completely serious.

Only then does he realize that he's grinning like a madman, and his face is burning red-hot. "Yeah, fine. Fine," he lies and turns to face the steering wheel.

"Weirdo," she says and flicks a piece of popcorn at him, chuckling.

The ride back home is in the pitch black, with the roof down, and April holds her hands high in the sky with the luminescence of the sparse houses, suburban homes down-wind, and the headlights to guide them. He watches frequently, catches her watching back, and loves the sound of wind whipping past them, the two of them. Together, they ride back home and he drops her off with that same thought:

 _What if I just kiss her?_

* * *

That night is the most shameful Andy has ever felt in his entire life. And that, to be honest, is saying something. But this is... different.

Andy tries not to give in to a wandering thought that grows on him until he can't help himself, he really does. However, he's also a teenager with a vivid imagination.

Aaron doesn't wake up, or at least pretends not to. It's worse tonight than before, and Andy's breathing is _heavy_ afterwards. His hand stills finally, and he takes heavy, shallow breaths in a failed attempt to keep quiet about all of this.

Eventually he'll have to face these thoughts; a battle to war against when he's ready. Right now, he can only sleep and pretend none of this happened.

* * *

 **an2:** _I hope you all are having fun with this fic, because without you and your requests to keep writing this I wouldn't have ever written any of this! It's true, and you are all the champions in this one._

 _Thank you to those of you that kept the fic alive in your minds, or at least remind me that I need to get off my ass and get something done!_

 _Reviews are magical, but the reads keep it going strong as well :)_


	9. Seventeen, or Spinning

**A/N:** _Last week was so unbearably hot here that I could barely do anything. Writing, sadly, being one of those "anythings."_

 _Anyways, we're closing in on the ending! That's exciting and also super terrifying, to me at least. I hope the week skip didn't prematurely scare anybody away, though I can't exactly blame you if so!_

 _Warning for some underage drinking._

* * *

A ring of dirt arcs forward, kicked up in the air by the rubber shredding against and into the ground underneath. Like wispy columns of smoke, the dust and dirt billows up only to be snatched away by the wind or, at least at the moment, brushed aside and cut into finer parts by the old, shaky truck. The plentiful, messy circles in the parking lot are accompanied by shouts of excitement within the truck. Andy's getting used to shifting in the tub of metal and glass, but April is the one clearly enjoying herself.

Every other skid and scrape is met with a shrill _yelp_ but she never tells him to stop.

"Is this awesome, or what?" he yells, the grinding of tire against dirt overwhelming in his ears.

April doesn't say anything particular, just a loud shout that comes out: "Woo!"

In a forgotten lot, the truck skids new doughnuts into the ground every few seconds. The truck itself was cheap, in some kind of road-worthy condition, and _loud_. Above all else, it was monstrous in size of the thing itself and its noises. The sheer volume of Andy's new-old truck is ridiculous, which is part of why it's so awesome. It's one thing when the engine rattles everything hanging loosely on the vehicle, or in the truck as April's increasing collection of dangling baubles as earrings and other jewelry can attest. They rattle terribly. The horrendous roar from beneath the hood is just that - an agonized, mechanical hell-cat shrieking into the Pawnee afternoon. That's the part that's kind-of a problem in just about any neighborhood.

April and Andy have important things to do at absurd-o'clock in the morning, and his _very own_ truck made that even easier. They can't just _walk_ around town to some of April's least favorite people's houses, egg them, and expect to run away in time, can they?

After the first time they egged that Knoblauch girl's house, they get better at parking the truck a few blocks away and figuring out the best routes of escape.

While its doors and windows rattle back in the former warehouse-turned-empty lot, now makeshift parking lot for a local construction company, April braces ehrself against his misshapen, circular route. "Oh, crap," she mumbles. It's slurred, and Andy can almost hear her stomach gurgle over the chaos outside.

"What's up?"

"Dude, I don't think the chili dogs were such a... oh crap, bad idea," April bemoans, holding both arms over her stomach and giving a painful, deep sigh.

Earlier, just after they left Pawnee High together as they do every other day, they decided to ignore whatever lame dinners could be waiting at home and instead went to JJ's Diner. Andy wasn't looking forward to whatever they were having, and April complained about her brother's cooking _all_ of the time. A couple bucks later and in a relatively private booth, they're scarfing down hot dogs covered in JJ's delicious Coney sauce, a pile of fresh french fries, and it wouldn't be a meal there without two tall milkshakes. Chocolate - Andy - and strawberry with a whole pile of Maraschino cherries for her. They make the strawberry look more like blood, and she says that's the only reason she wants them.

April eats every single cherry.

And, apparently, all of this was about to paint his dashboard and interior of the windshield if Andy didn't stop or slow down. Which, as hilarious as that might end up being later, would probably suck a ton to clean up, so Andy slows down and comes to a careful stop.

Pulling over at the edge of the lot, Andy creaks his door open and hops out of the truck. April starts to roll out of the truck, but he offers his hand and she puts the majority of her weight on him as she steps down on wobbly legs. Where tiny, _tiny_ April Wyatt years ago was, now stands a still quite short girl, but Andy has to brace himself not to let her dead weight bowl him over.

It takes another half-second, and April is already keeled over near some bushes. All that lead up to was Andy awkwardly holding her hair back and waiting. She didn't seem very talkative, understandably, or as much as the word could be used to describe her. Now, though, she's clearly focused on something else.

"I'm fine," she finally says after that long, strange time spent holding her hair back from her face. "Thanks. For... yeah."

"No problem, and um... maybe we shouldn't, uh, do that after you eat, like, every fry in the country," he offers with a grin.

April stands up and brushes the dirt off of her pants. Some mud cakes against the black denim, so she gives up. The walk back, April looks pale but when they're back inside the truck the atmosphere returns. Remembering his comment, April pipes up. "Y'know, you totally ate more than me," she tells him oh so matter-of-factly and without a trace of a smile. She's good. "So maybe JJ poisoned me."

"Aww, no way! Besides," he starts and quiets for a second, starting up again to drive wherever they wanted to be. It's such a nice feeling. Andy chuckles and, continuing, says, "Besides, you definitely ate like half the plate before I ever got my food."

Instead of a vocal answer, April fixes him with a deathly glare of snake's eyes and pursed lips. If she wasn't also struggling to crack into a laugh, it would be genuinely terrifying. Andy wonders, in the darkening skies, whether this is what some of the other kids feel like at school when they see the two of them hanging. Even Burly is intimidated by April, and it's awesome. Even better when Orin is there, because they're a Tag Team of Terror - coined by Andy, thank you very much - and it's _hilarious_.

The rest of the meager night is between streets and annoying people whose names neither of them know. Eventually, they do have to go home. Andy drops April off at her driveway with a warm grin and burning cheeks. April does this thing, and he can only call it a _thing_. She lifts one corner of her mouth up just the slightest bit, gives him a sideways glance, and refuses to hold his look with hers. At this point, after this long, he can feel something different there. Something cognizant in April of this, what they're doing, but refusing to even ask if it's okay.

Maybe he's not the best in school or anything, but Andy's pretty sure he knows exactly how to interpret _this_.

Perhaps it's always been there, always been like this, and he's just never looked properly.

"G'night," April says quickly and whirls around to escape the truck without a reply. She doesn't run, anywhere ever, but her steps are quick to reach her front door.

"Good night!" Andy shouts, ignoring the fact that her dad's probably trying to fall asleep.

Andy sinks back into the half-obliterated cushion of the driver's side seat with a heavy groan. He claps his face with his hands, palms over his eyes, and rubs at his forehead in exasperation. He can hear April open up that front door, the sounds of her sneakers thumping up her stairs. He can just barely hear, or think to hear, what he guesses is Ben taking another day off from packing. Another day waiting, procrastinating for a very particular reason. It turns out that his original, dream plan of a two-and-two washes all away with a particular person.

Andy promises to keep their secret. He'd be, like, a hypocrite or something if he didn't.

Because, frankly, it eases his mind about a lot. Andy isn't particularly sure why, but it just does. He could figure it out if he tried, but it scares him a little. With that still in mind, Andy practically coasts his way home just down the street. Home, where all of his brothers have left for school; left to live their own lives. To live, to work, and away from the home. Away from mom, from him. It's lonely sometimes, but that's why he spends every waking moment he can with April and Burly.

"How was your date, hon?" His mom calls out from the living room. He tries to avoid the question, but she asks, louder this time, "Andy?"

"Yes, mom," he grumbles in reply. Stomping over to the fridge, he takes a can of store-brand Cola out and chugs half of it in one drink.

"And I asked you: how was your date?" she repeats.

"Wasn't a date," he mutters while he walks to the couch in the living room and flops down unceremoniously.

"Andrew, shoes," she chastises him and only then does he realize he's been tracking dirt.

"Oh, mom I'm sorry," he groans apologetically. Pulling the boots off, he walks them back to their shoe rack and stares at his mess on the floor. "I'll get this!" he yells and goes to get the broom.

"Don't worry about it, just tell me how _your date was_ ," she asks more forcefully this time. When Andy returns from the utility room with the broom and dustpan she's already swept up half of the dirt with a hand-broom.

"Mom, I said-"

"Andy, you can't lie to your mother," she admonishes with a smirk. "You've been hanging out with April since you were kids. Just gimme the benefit of the doubt on this one."

"Well, we had chili dogs and milkshakes at JJ's," Andy starts, and his mom nods with that same smile plastered on her face. "And then she almost threw up on the Eagleton border."

"Like, on the border?" his mom asks with a stifled chuckle. "Maybe on one of the security guards?"

"Nah, but that _would_ be awesome," he agrees, but then shakes his head quickly after. "Wait, it wasn't a date! Okay?"

"Okay," she stops teasing but never lets that smile falter.

 _She's not wrong_ , he thinks.

* * *

Half the school thinks they're dating anyways.

The band that Burly managed to cobble together with Andy, featuring a rotating drummer in a glorious tradition, thinks so for sure. Every time they practice, and by that he means they gather together and play some chords and the weekly new guy drummer tests the feel for their rhythm, she comes with them. At first, Burly protests.

But then he realizes that someone is listening to their music, their shitty covers, and talking to her group of friends.

Before long, word spreads and they don't even know how they did it, but they have a place to play. Like, an actual _gig_. To be fair, it's at a house party, but this means that somebody other than April will get to hear their sweet renditions of Nirvana songs. April tries to squeeze a Smiths song in but, somehow, that gets vetoed. She still thinks it's awesome.

"It'll be sweet to have an audience, right?" she asks them after a surprisingly focused session in Burly's garage. The cheapo amp and electric guitar Andy bought at a yard sale keep up respectably, and nobody will be able to tell how bad it actually sounds.

"I mean, we already do," Burly says. Andy nods in agreement.

"I mean more than one person." April rolls her eyes in response. "Seriously, this is awesome!"

"How'd people even hear about it?" Andy wonders aloud.

"I think one of Stacy's dumb friends heard me talking about you guys, so... yeah," she says with her arms folded. She stands up and moves the plastic folding chair back over to the corner of Burly's garage.

"So are you going to, uh... y'know," Andy stammers, picking at his unplugged guitar. "You're coming right?"

"Duh, I'm practically your manager or something," April says with a deadpan. She sighs. "It's a lot of really hard work. I deserve 99% of all cash made."

"Deal," Andy says instantly.

"Dude, no," Burly interrupts. "You can get some pizza and beer if we get any."

"Nice," April grins.

And so it was. They would play at the Reiners' house, while her parents were out and Stacy could convince her to have a party. April will come to watch, and everything will go perfectly normal. The night would be spent drinking watered down light beers, eating cheap pizza, and that's all. There might not even be anyone there to begin with.

Of course, this isn't how it goes whatsoever.

* * *

The first warning sign should be the size of the party. While Andy expected a fair few people to arrive, there's so _many_ that he and the rest of Mouse Rat - the nonsense he blurted randomly when asked what their name was - have to play in the basement. That's fine, anyways. All that matters is that, right now, he's playing a show with his band to somebody other than April.

Not that April was bad, far from it Andy reasons in his mind, but there's something different when people know them as the band from high school. One of many, but did they all have no bassist? That was definitely something they had going for them.

A few pass them by when Andy realizes...

 _We have no bassist._

How could he have forgotten something so simple? Burly said his friend Chang would be up for it, but Andy kept forgetting. Apparently doing doughnuts in his truck with April was more important. Burly never said a word, and that worried Andy. Sometimes it felt like Burly didn't care about the band as much as Andy did, and as the lead singer Andy took that very personally. But still, it would be okay. Nobody would even notice. They didn't notice in that garage, so what could go wrong?

Andy ignores that and sets his stuff down in the basement, afterwards helping Rivers move his drumset piecemeal into the small room. April sat down there the whole while, watching all the gear to make sure no weirdos came by and stole anything. It was always a possibility, but Andy is too high on the emerging bustle above.

When all is set up, Andy grabs April's hand without thinking and leads her back upstairs to grab some pizza and beer before they start playing.

The crowd is growing, people from school that Andy recognizes, a few from rival schools that he plays against in baseball, and plenty that he's just never seen before. At the few metal tubs, crowned with ice and little silver cans, Andy grabs two and finds April by the pizza.

"So, this is pretty cool, right?" he shouts over the swarm of voices.

April emphatically nods a _no_. "No!" she says after anyways, and hands him his pizza.

By the time they reach the basement door, the crowd has yet to swallow them whole. Andy has to smash himself between people, clearing a way for the both of them with his size. It works, but it feels horrible and April sticks as close to him as possible. He starts to wonder if he should have brought her to this at all.

With the party noise muffled downstairs, Rivers is stacking his drums together and Burly is finishing his own setup. April cracks open the beer, takes a sip, and grimaces.

"Ew," she groans, horrified by her drink. "This is fucking disgusting."

Andy laughs and passes his unopened can to Burly, taking April's can from her. She doesn't seem to mind, taking a seat on a dusty old armchair relatively close to where Mouse Rat - and on second hand, what an awesome name - set up their equipment. After some feedback, and a few wailing notes trying to find the right volumes, it all seems perfect. It doesn't take long after Andy leads them into "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Lead with what you know, right?

He thinks it sounds good, especially because Rivers is bigger than Andy and hits the drums like he's trying to fight them. It's crazy loud and wild, and at times April looks startled by the screeching feedback their amps give them in annoyance. Several people file downstairs, but for the most part the basement door simply stays open and they continue their mini-set.

After finishing the first song, they take a quick break. "So, were we okay?" Andy asks April, who's got her legs pulled up in the chair and resting her head against her thighs as they play. "I mean, you hate this stuff but... y'know? Were we-?"

"That was awesome!" he's interrupted by a voice from behind. A cheery, nice, gentle voice. "Oh my God, Andy, you never told me you had a band!" Ann Perkins says, a smile seven seas wide on her face.

April, however, only bears storms on hers. "Because he didn't want to tell you," she deadpans.

Ann doesn't seem to take notice. Hell, she doesn't even really know who this ball of anger is. Instead, she genially continues without a care in the world. "Yeah, I mean you can hear the music pretty loud from upstairs, but we're pretty far out from town, right?" Ann says with a smile. Andy recognizes that smile from a painfully awkward encounter a few years ago. "So, we should be good if there's lots of noise. You guys sounded awesome."

April scoffs and kicks herself out of her chair. She jingles all the way, but nobody laughs and Andy can feel his face go from frustration to lax sorrow. He nods to what Ann says a little more, watching his neighbor stomp her way upstairs to where dozens of older guys would be and would want to probably kiss her, where she could make him jealous. Where she _would_ make him jealous, so Andy politely finishes the conversation with Ann and tries to go back to playing but April is too heavy on his mind.

He calls a longer break, and steps back into the stampede of youth upstairs. It's hectic, but finding April is easy. She's sitting on the kitchen floor, the pizza just above her and out of reach, with a plate loaded with four slices. She picks up one of the slices of pizza and numbly chews as a few people pass her by and look at her, laughing or sneering. Andy gets the sense, by how cold and unmoving she is, that this isn't unusual. Apparently Mouse Rat's setup was very quick because the rest of the cavalcade pushes past Andy, clearly unable to tell that he is the guy from the awesome band downstairs.

Andy sits down next to April, the light beer tasting worse as the night goes on and not better like some people said. Maybe that wasn't due to the beer, though. After a few heartbeats, just enough where Andy can hear the sounds of Rivers tapping at his snare impatiently and April taking deep breaths, he sighs. April glances at him, then at her plate, and offers the pizza to him.

He decides to take a few before April devours them all. For somebody so small, she sure could chow.

"Y'know, we probably shouldn't go do doughnuts later," Andy says with a sheepish smile and without looking at her. He takes a bite of the pizza and the mixture - warm beer and lukewarm pizza - is nauseating.

"Probably," she says and Andy looks for a split second to see her shrug. "Besides, you wanna hang with Ann, anyways-"

"I don't like her," Andy blurts out without really processing the words or what they could mean. Not even what they _could_ mean - what they mean now.

"What?" April asks through a mouthful of pizza. The blossom of heat in his chest that means he really wants to kiss her is both hilarious and frightening at that moment. She finishes the bite. "I mean, whatever. Who cares."

"April, I... I really, really don't like her. Like, that way," Andy whispers. Or, at this point he's speaking at a normal volume but it sounds like a whisper at that house. It's incredible how they don't just say it, and Andy's annoyed but doesn't know how to act on it. Act - and her sauce-flecked lips are calling for action. "Like, at all. Seriously."

"Uh huh," she grunts absentmindedly.

Andy doesn't know what to say for a while. He isn't sure how long they stay there, but eventually April drifts and leans her cheek head against his shoulder.

"I can prove it," he scrambles to say quietly. It's the first thing that pops into his head that doesn't sound stupid, and yet it's the dumbest thing he could say. He turns to look at her, cross-legged on the kitchen floor. "I can prove it."

"How?" She turns to meet his stare. Facing him. So very, very close. He can smell the fruity shampoo she uses over the pizza, BO, and beer. There's also the hint of that novelty skunk spray deodorant that she tried on earlier.

She blinks rapidly, and he _swears_ that her lips part to say something and she definitely bites her bottom lip. He could, should, just lean in and-

"Hey Andy, why are you in here? We've been looking for you forever," Stacy Reiner, the girl whose house everyone is demolishing at that moment, interrupts with a heavy slur in her voice. She eyes the two of them and they scoot away from each other, realizing how small a distance this was.

"Oh, really?" Andy gives April a confused look and she shrugs. "Why?"

"Well, it's not a part if... if we don't play spin the uh, what's that... the thing," Stacy looks like she's concentrating so hard and then exclaims, "Bottle! C'mon, c'mon! We gotta play."

Andy is practically dragged out and April follows. When they're outside of the kitchen, and they have to follow Stacy's drunken steps, Andy takes April's hand in his. It's happened multiple times that night already and he doesn't know what got into him, but he can't help it now. She never tossed it off or told him to stop. He isn't sure what it's for either - whether to make sure she isn't tempted to leave or so she isn't swallowed whole by the crowd, all of the options in his head make no sense. April only returns his squeeze and follows the drunk girl up the stairs to the second floor.

The drunken chanting from the last room down the hallway they walk isn't surprising, but for whatever reason Andy still laughs. April has to roll her lips not to join him. When they enter, everyone shouts a wild cheer at the sight of Andy, and then April enters.

Several people groan, and the look on her face when Andy tugs at her hand is somewhere between annoyance, anger, and revulsion. The best shades, in his mind. He just says, "It's cool. C'mon, we don't even have to play."

But then, April spots her - Ann's sitting down in the little circle beside Stacy Knoblauch and an empty spot. She lets go of Andy's hand and practically falls down into the spot so nobody can take it. Andy laughs again, taking the spot opposite April.

"So... here's the rules," Stacy Reiner starts and then has to take a deep breath. Whether it's to think, hold back vomit, or because she lost her train of thought altogether and isn't sure where she is, nobody can tell. The only remotely sober people in the circle are Andy and April. "Okay, okay, okay. Rules. The rules... are-" she leans forward and grabs the glass beer bottle. "We spin the bottle and-" she hiccups. "We, uh, kiss that person. I mean, like, one-on-one, unless-"

"Just spin it," Rivers, who Andy didn't see at first, shouts.

With that remarkably unwieldy set of rules, Stacy barely spins the bottle before it lands on Stacy Knoblauch. Rivers and Andy cheer loudly, and April's face turns red from laughter. The two girls waste no time before the bottle moves over to the girl next to April that Andy doesn't know.

It lands right next to Andy on the guy at his right. He sighs relief, mostly because April's eyes widen when the bottle nearly stops on Andy.

Downstairs, the riotous party has to be alerting somebody. In this junky closet-room, Andy realizes, they're surrounded by appliances and piles of towels. He focuses on the mountain of toilet paper in one corner rather than look at April or, especially, Ann. The other Stacy goes up, and she breathes relief when the bottle lands on Rivers.

The guy nearly shouts in excitement, and the look on his spectacle-laden face is priceless. He's in the same year as Knoblauch and it's clear that he has a serious case of "Nerd Likes the Cool Girl." Stacey barely gives him a peck on the lips, but he's still beaming nonetheless. Andy's sober enough to be able to remind him later.

The mood changes considerably when Ann gets her hand on the bottle next. Andy's breathing hitches for a second when she leans forward and the low-cut, tight shirt she's wearing distracts him for a stupid, stupid second. Thankfully, April doesn't notice and he wants to smack himself. However, Ann isn't looking at him anymore. In fact, that move was reserved for the guy on the other side of Andy who arrived at the last second. This guy - chiseled jaw, lean and fit body, with a beautiful smile - is so beyond Andy's league that he has to laugh and wonder why in the hell Ann chose him at first.

Ann gets her wish, and her and the Hot, New Guy makeout like it's what they've been wanting to do all night. As it turns out, it's what they _have_ been doing all night. They end up in the room down the hall, with lots of _ooh_ 's and _woah_ 's from the rest of the group.

"Dude, it's your turn," Rivers says to April, who's still watching Andy.

"Yeah, c'mon, don't be weird," Knoblauch says with a drunken snigger. She and Reiner share hideous laughter together while everyone else waits.

April quirks her nose, winces one eye like she's winking, and bites her bottom lip again. Andy recognizes that... and only hopes this time it doesn't end in a bruised thumb. Instead, she twiddles the bottle back and forth on the floor before giving it a hefty twist.

It spins for what seems like forever. Everyone's eyes go wide when it seems to slow on Rivers, who can't believe his luck, but Andy's heart skips a beat when its momentum continues. The green glass bottle keeps spinning, just barely enough, for him to look up at April and watch her stare at that bottle like she's watching a televised car crash. Her eyes _never_ leave the thing, and Andy watches her chest heave with heavy breaths. The beetle nestled in her chest is unmoving, and Andy doesn't mask his attentions on _her_ breasts.

He gets to watch her breaths stop when the bottle does something apparently amazing - he watches her eyes light up, that incandescent energy flowing through the room towards him, and those eyes, wide eyes, lift up.

She lifts her head up to look.

At Andy.

He looks down.

The bottle is pointing at him.

Everyone shrieks, except the two of them.

Andy doesn't lean forward. That is too lazy, too sloppy.

April stands with him, and she moves first.

He doesn't fight it; doesn't dare. He doesn't want to, doesn't want to when her small body crashes into his and she's shaking against him.

Not when April's lips taste like pizza and skunk and leaves and fruity lip balm and April, and him, and he can taste the world on her mouth. The world he worries about, all of that, against her kiss is nothing and tastes like victory. He returns that kiss, lets his arms over her shoulders and hugs her tighter. Everything around him deadens into a warm emptiness because _oh my godohmygodohmygod_ April Wyatt is kissing him and he's kissing her back and there's no tongue like with Ann but his heart is thundering unlike with Ann, and his entire body is shaking with delight and he's reacting to her and he can't help it - dumb teenager, dumb dumb dumb - but _oh God_.

He breaks away after what could only be described as a precious infinity, not even close enough to forever, when the world around returns to him like a television with its sound suddenly cranked up.

Rivers is screaming in the background, hollering and whooping, and the Staceys are grimacing horribly. Somewhere downstairs there's a party, and Andy thinks he hears something down the hall, but all of it is null.

April, still in his arms and with her hands crawling up and down his sides, is beaming. She's giving him an all-teeth smile and her face is deep red, dark skin and darker blood pounding against skin, and her eyes are shining with something that he dares not to ask. He doesn't want to wonder, doesn't care. Andy can feel the dumb smile on his face, unable to close his mouth whenever he tries to say something. Her arms are gentle underneath him, and her mouth returns to his wordlessly for a reprise to the most beautiful dance of lips he's ever tasted, wanted, and been given.

It's otherworldly, he feels like he's falling forever into a dream and refuses to wake up. If it's a dream, he doesn't want to forget kicking the door behind him open to the shouts of the people inside - _Hey, you're not done yet!_ \- and April finally stops kissing him. Finally, and he hates that word.

She starts laughing, and her red face and tears could be so easily misconstrued as results from the laughter that Andy can't help himself. He joins in, and before long they're broken apart to laugh at the whole scenario at the top of the stairs.

They calm down eventually. Andy can't keep his eyes from hers. He notices them, loves them unconditionally, and right now they're small and calm.

She speaks first.

"Uh... so," is all the beautiful eloquence he needs to hear.

"Holy _shit_ ," he half-shouts before rushing forward and wrapping his arms around April's waist. He doesn't think of her as his fourteen-year old lower classmate right then. He lifts her up easily in his arms and crashes down the stairs in hurried footsteps. "Holy shit!" he keeps yelling all the way to the basement, down to that ugly, smelly chair and where Burly's lip-locked with a gorgeous senior.

"Dude, what-?"

But Andy's in the chair and April curls up in his lap. They cannot stop kissing, and he's nearly convinced that he's dead or dying. He must have fallen down the stairs there. He hit his head on something.

No, but he _does_ feel April's mouth open up against his.

The concert afterwards, when April finally lets him disentangle from her, is sloppy and noisy but Andy forces everyone to play that stupid Led Zeppelin ballad. He screams the lyrics and keeps the distortion roaring, and the band follows suit for this punk rendition.

He roars the lyrics out, breaking his voice against the joy he's dying to wrap in his arms and keep forever.

April is right up in front of him throughout the whole concert, ignoring the volume. She watches him and he never takes his eyes off of her as he plays. Everything is right in that moment, and he cries out every word in that agonized yell that is so unlike his regular singing voice, gruff and sometimes crooning. Andy doesn't care, and when the solo comes up and Burly is somehow _better_ when he's sloshed, Andy brushes his guitar aside.

He lets the feedback envelop them just as he presses his lips to April's, awash in noise and distortion as they kiss again and again into the night.


	10. Eighteen, or Stay

**A/N:** _Another long wait! Well, not nearly as long as before so it's hopefully not_ too _bad._

 _This one is gonna be a doozy. Hold onto your butts, folks._

* * *

Turns out, being the last of the Dwyer brothers to move out of the house does have its advantages. For one, his mom is much less strict when it comes to food, curfews, and girls. Or, more specifically, April. Now that he thinks about it, Ann never did come around his house that often. His mom would have liked her.

Instead, she has to put up with April. Which, really, works out just fine. The weirdness grew on her years ago, so April comes and goes as she pleases. However, ever since she caught wind of the two of them together - and _boy_ did Andy get a load of nonsense about maturity from her - his mom has been a bit more cautious. It's fair. In all honesty, Andy's convinced it's not for his well-being, either.

Still, the maturity and responsibility talks happen just about every other week.

And it's no wonder why she likes April. She's not an idiot, thinks it's cool to eat canned soup every day like they live in a post-war bunker, and Andy's never been happier in his whole life. What more could she ask for? If she _did_ hate April, then Andy would have had to deal with those talks by himself. As it is, April has the amazing privilege of joining him for the fun.

 _"Fun."  
_

"Now, I trust that you two aren't..." his mother trails off with a tired sigh. If this is supposed to be a disciplinarian talk, April and Andy wouldn't be sitting next to each other on the couch in Andy's living room. "Moving too fast?" she finishes, clearly meaning something else.

"Uh, it's been a couple months," Andy mutters. "We're probably going plenty fast-"

April snorts. He glances at her and then his mom, who is only shaking her head.

After a few awkward seconds, April gulps loudly and looks like she was just caught putting her dad's clothes in a fire again. Yes, again. "Yeah... so, that's like a really long time." April shrugs.

"I just want to make sure... um, y'know that you two aren't going-" a sigh, "Not going _at it_ already? Too fast?"

April and Andy glance at each other and shrug in what feels like unison.

"What I mean is," his mother tries to explain with a sigh, "are the two of you... y'know?"

Andy laughs. "Are we what?" he asks, though April's eyes go wide and he's still confused. "What?"

April starts, "She's asking-"

"Are the two of you having sex?" his mother interrupts.

For a solid ten seconds - oh, more like what could have been an hour in that position - Andy sits appalled at the suggestion. Nevermind the fact that she never asked something like that when he and Ann were negotiation the awkward in-betweens of adolescence. Forget the part where she didn't really know who Ann was, or even know who she is, it still counts as far as he is concerned.

He _had_ had sex with Ann, but never a more awkward and less satisfying encounter had there ever been. There's no way someone out there has any more of a weird time with someone than that night ended up with Ann.

Looking to April for support, he half expects a disgusted sneer. How would she react to this question? He's not even sure, the question never comes up. Though he _clearly_... well, reacts sometimes (she says she can't blame him and it's the coolest thing in the world for so many reasons). The question never comes up and that's okay. He doesn't expect to bring it up, doesn't really want to push that awkwardness he experienced with Ann on April.

Instead of that scorn, he finds a blanched face and sunken, wide eyes.

"So...? Is that a yes?" his mother sits forward on the little rocking chair next to their bookcase.

"Like, with each other?" Andy asks just to be sure he's heard this correctly. April elbows him in the ribs. "Ow! I mean... yeah?"

"We're not..." April sighs, "That's lame. We're not doing it, okay?" She finishes in rapid fire syllables.

 _Well, that's new._

"It's lame?" Andy whispers, a little confused. She gives him a withering look that quiets. "Right. We're, uh, not doing it. Honestly, mom. We're not!"

"Oh thank goodness. Okay, hon. I just wanted to make sure that... y'know, if you were..."

"What?" Andy asks, because there's something in her voice there. He can't quite place it, though.

A long, stoic silence passes between the three of them. Stark relief is still in his mother's face. "If you _do_... do it as you've so delightfully worded it," she looks at April who gives a pursed lips smile. Her color is returning. "Please make sure you use protection."

Now it's Andy's turn to feel all the blood leave his face. Now he understands what was in her voice. It's not _rare_ , per se, but it is certainly something that Andy hasn't heard since he was a little kid.

It would happen when he accidentally took a bag of marshmallows from the store without telling anyone, and he would lie to his mother that he bought them with his own money - where he thought he got it is beyond him now, but it seemed smart back then. Or when he and April rode bikes through the streets at midnight when nobody else knew where they were, and Andy tried to explain they weren't doing anything weird. Seems like she knew even back then.

He recognizes what's in her voice: she doesn't believe them.

* * *

After a while, the two of them retreat up to his room. He flops down onto his bed and puts his head in his hands.

He can hear April sit down on the rug in the middle of the room and pop open the bag she brought over with her. He sighs loudly and she snorts another laugh. It's so weird thinking about that, thinking about her laughter and how they're supposed to ignore this question after hanging it in front of them. Before it was in Andy's perverted brain, and probably not hers because it _couldn't_ be.

Despite the fact that's felt her kiss, felt her open her mouth for him, and he's still convinced she can't think like this. For what reason, he's not quite sure. But still that question hangs, and another that he needs to get off his chest.

"You think it's lame?" he asks her, rubbing his face and sighing before looking her in the eyes.

Indeed sitting in the center of the room on that rug, April glances at him confused. She pulls out a long sketch pad and flips it open to a seemingly random page. She likes to pick a random page and start fresh on her drawings every day. He found that out after he wondered why she wasn't continuing a richly detailed portrait of her backyard complete with a stylized rendition of their ruined fort.

She scratches something into the pad he can't see. He watches her focus on the drawing and the way her face changes when she does it is so mesmerizing. It's too cute when her forehead pinches in frustration at a minor mistake or annoyance she has to erase and improve.

"Uh, so... yeah," Andy says, trying to push but not push at the same time. It's the worst, weirdest way to talk to someone he _really_ likes. Even if he isn't saying an actual word there it sucks. "So, um-"

"Hm?" April looks up as if she's been asleep this whole time. Likely she hopes he thought so. "Oh, yeah that. I dunno. I'm gonna blame it on bad choice of words."

"Oh..." he nods and April gives him a weak shrug in response. Her face isn't downcast or anything, just focused on something else. He should know better. "So, you don't think it's weird? I mean, it's cool if you do! I don't wanna... I just wanna know, y'know? Like, if sex is weird. Sex with me, duh."

His face is red hot when he shuts himself up.

April fidgets with her pencil, staring down at the piece of paper because it won't stare and ask her this question. All of a sudden, Andy wants to take it back and apologize for a thousand years for asking that of her. There's no reason a girl, fifteen years old, should have to deal with these questions. Especially not from her fairly older - by ratio - boyfriend. There's no reason to be this cruel to her, and the obvious shielded discomfort is almost too much.

And that's on _his_ end. He can't imagine what it's like for her.

Still, April chuckles darkly. If he wasn't so embarrassed still by his mother's interrogation, and confused by his emotions about the situation, then the sound would be cute. He tries not to think about how often he thinks April is cute.

"Hmm, so do I think that sex with Andy Dwyer is gonna be bad? Maybe it'll be gross and weird. But Andy Dwyer? First string pitcher for Pawnee High and lead singer of a kickass rock band?" she feigns deep thought, tapping her chin with exaggerated bumps of the tip of her index finger. She abruptly stops the motion and deadpans, "Maybe weird, but nah."

"Nice!"

"But that doesn't mean I'm ready for it, Andy," she warns him. "Just... I don't wanna make us, or this, I don't wanna this-" she gestures between the two of them. "I don't wanna make it weird for us."

"Totally." Andy nods. He knows he should be entirely on her side here, though he can't help but _wonder_ what it'd be like. "Obviously, yes. Wait. Slow."

Since they've started dating, Andy has done an awful lot of that wondering if only because it feels slightly less worse now. She's still his younger neighbor, but he doesn't think it can be _that_ wrong can it? Not when they're like this, or maybe he should be an adult and turn this all down.

But, sadly, he can't. There's no way.

It's weird, though. Anyone that hurts her is immediately his worst enemy, so what happens if something happens between them? Does that mean he has to give himself a wedgie? How does any of this work? He's a little lost and completely confused at the idea, but not at the idea of her.

Perhaps it's creepy, maybe it isn't. He's not sure, and Andy isn't sure where he's supposed to go to ask. Even worse, the way she likes to kiss him is definitely the most confusing for his emotions and body.

And you can't blame him. Not when her bangs act like a shield against most people, but only give her mystique an unusual air to him that's even cooler. Or staying up all night asking questions about which place would be the best to hole up in if there were ever a zombie apocalypse; or the way she bites her bottom lip in concentration and the odd stirring he has in response; or the garish blue eye shadow she has on that makes the both of them laugh. In his bedroom, with her slinking into his lap, kissing him.

Here, in his room, where sleepovers are a bit more than they used to be.

When April sneaks out of her house to climb into Andy's window, their discussions flow from the very important questions - _would you sleep with five duck sized Dave Grohls or one Dave Grohl sized duck_ \- to the pleasant and boring - _Ben finally told Dad about Ms. Knope and him before he left yesterday, so that was pretty funny_ \- and, of course, the extra personal.

Things that, despite all the weirdness in him, Andy isn't repeating straight-faced anytime soon.

"I mean, it's not like we won't make out," April explains to him at night. She accents this very salient point by snuggling deeper into him in the bed, something that neither of them should be getting away with considering their parents but something that nobody has found out about. Somehow.

If you told him the year before that April Wyatt would be sneaking into his room at night, Andy might have fainted on the spot.

* * *

"Andrew, can you stay back after class?" Ms. Knope calls out as the period bell rings.

Her senior year Local History and Government class was supposed to be, and looked like, a cakewalk. All of his brothers had taken the course and slouched their ways through to A grades. That was, however, before Ms. Knope taught the class.

She is a fair teacher, but Andy knows that much already. It isn't even a problem, really. It's just that Ms. Knope expects things of her students that most teachers wouldn't, and expects people to care about the topic at hand. Just as well, he knows that laziness is never tolerated in that very same way. The material is God-awfully boring, even with her candid optimism for the subject and obvious attempts at drawing everybody into the topics. No level of teaching quality can change the boredom in every student, sadly.

"How's your research project going so far?" Ms. Knope sits on her desk which, along with sitting with her chest to the flat back of a school chair, is one of her favorite ways to act like the _cool_ teacher. "I haven't gotten updates lately. I need to know all the history of Pawnee and Eagleton's baseball rivalries! This is just as important to me as it is to your grade, Andy."

He watches the grin she gives him. It's honestly baffling that she doesn't know that already, but at the same time there's just _so_ much about Pawnee that she does know. It's ridiculous the amount of knowledge this woman has on such a crappy, dinky town. Up until this recent string of seasons, Pawnee's record against Eagleton had been extremely spotty at best. Back in '74, Chad Mackleninny threw a perfect game for the first time in Pawnee history. Then, in the eighties a kid named Horace Ababblebab beat that record with _two_ perfect games in a season. It's no wonder that Andy pays more attention to the pitchers, but it seems like Pawnee's never had a star hitter in its entire history.

This was legendary-type stuff, and it came from this craphole of a town that Knope loves so much.

Andy notices this in her lessons as well, but Ms. Knope takes an unusual delight in the very concept of Eagleton losing at anything. It's to the point where she instantly approved his research project idea the moment the words _baseball rivalry_ were included. This turned out to have far more math involved than Andy would have liked, but he gets to combine something he at least enjoys with a horrible, soul draining process. Maybe, at least, Knope found something in that too.

"Oh, yeah I just... haven't been able to get to the public library lately-"

"Why would you want to go to a stupid _public library_?" she interrupts, scandalized.

"Uh, well because I thought that they would have, like, newspapers and stuff and I could maybe figure out some of these games?" he tried explaining. April said it was an awesome idea, but now Knope has him worried. "I gotta do research for the research project, right?"

There's no sarcasm in his voice.

"Yes, for the research project it might be a good idea," Ms. Knope says with a chuckle. "But why... ugh, why a library? You can just borrow my newspapers!"

"Uh... borrow _yours_?" Andy asks, confused again. It's all so confusing. All of this is too confusing, from the project that matters too much to his regular life outside of school that is awesome. How can one part of his life suck so much and drain him when the other is so great?

"It's no accident that I teach Local History, Andy," she remarks with a small, self-satisfied smirk. "I'll bring a few boxes in tomorrow and you can figure out if you wanna take some home."

 _A few boxes? How many does she have!?_

"Won't I have to-?"

"They're all sorted by year, so I can just pick where you left off," she says. "Which year was it?"

"1986," he answers.

"Great!"

"Thanks." Andy stands up to leave, but Ms. Knope shakes her head and nods back to the seat. So Andy sits again and sighs.

"You're very welcome, but Andy... this wasn't the only reason I asked you to say behind," Knope explains.

"I've gotta go to my next class-"

"It's fine, I'll write you an excuse."

That's unusual. Knope rarely makes anyone late and even rarer still, she doesn't forcefully do it. Her tone isn't aggressive or anything, so Andy manages to stay calm in this and his seat. She looks him in the eyes when they talk one-to-one. It's not a common chat, but she has a strange consistency in queries about how everything is; how is home, how are his projects, how are his friends and his band.

"Oh, okay," Andy mutters cautiously. "If this is about the Skittles, I'm sorry I ate all of 'em before I could share some-"

"Andy, it's fine. I've forgiven you," she adds without a hint of a joke in her voice.

"C'mon, I'm gonna be late for shop and Swanson will-"

"He will wait and then deal with me if has a problem. If he gives you guff, he'll know to deal with me," she contends. Andy sighs and nods. "This isn't about candy or Mr. Swanson or anything like that, though. I wanted to ask you how April is doing."

Unexpected yet again.

It's true that Knope is the only teacher to get a positive response from April. True, the relativity of that positive reaction is clear. That being, April remarks with a disinterested shrug at the mention of Ms. Knope. It's far better than the feigned gagging and groans of annoyance, or even that one time she threatened arson. As far as Andy's concerned, that moderate response is high praise from April.

But even so, even for as kind a teacher as she was, the question lingers oddly in his mind. What reason could she have to ask about April? What could have triggered that? Maybe she disapproves of their relationship, but that seems oddly hypothetical of her (he's pretty sure that's right, because he heard that in his chemistry class and they are talking about chemistry between people so it makes sense obviously). Though it might be hypodermic, or even hypodynamic. It's one of them, he's sure. Either way, Andy's sole response to that question is a shrug.

 _Smooth._

"Andrew." She bows her head in mild frustration.

 _Why does everyone use my full name when they're annoyed with me?_ It's what he'd like to say, but instead of that he just sits there and waits.

"How is April?" she repeats calmly.

"Fine, I think," Andy replies.

"How's her... art coming along?" She puts a strange stress on it and Andy chuckles. "She is very creative, y'know."

"Yeah, I know. Yep," he answers. Confused, he has to ask, "Why don't you, uh... not to be rude, but why don't you ask her these things?"

"That's very sweet of you Andy, but you know... she withdraws. She's quiet," she explains with an earnestness that's just so nice to hear from an adult. It's likely why Andy's so drawn to Swanson for his blunt, fair honesty and Knope's kind, optimistic honesty. There aren't very many adults, many that he knows, that speak to him like this. Like he's somewhat of an equal, even if she's not _that_ much older than him. It's refreshing. "I wanted to ask somebody that's close to her. From what I understand, the two of you have been very close for years."

"Did Ben tell you that?" Andy teases.

"Yes. He also says that you're a great guy," she says quickly and laughs. "Andy! Don't avoid the topic like that. It's unfair to me."

"Okay," he quiets. "We are totally dating, though." He has to remind her, apparently. There's so much pride in his chest at saying, so much that flares up that it's comparable to being told that he's the closest person to April that can be trusted with these questions.

"But this is more important, Andy," she explains carefully. It's clear on his face he doesn't quite understand what she could mean. "Yes, you're dating right now and I don't want to lecture you on that front right now."

"Lecture? Wait-"

"Andy, it's very important that you _are_ this close with her. It's... it's very, very... look, as long as she wants you around you need to stay in her life," she almost whispers which, if it weren't for everyone else being in class already, would have been indecipherable. "Don't push yourself in there, and don't rush her. What I'm saying is that it's very important that she has somebody like you."

"But, I thought-"

"What's important is that she has someone that cares about her like you do. Don't get this wrong, though," she takes on her authoritarian tone and Andy sits up a little straighter on instinct, "she does not owe you a thing even for this. But, she does want you around, correct?"

"Uh, I think so..." he trails off, so confused by all of this. That's what this whole conversation is right now: confusing.

"So stick around," she says.

"But I was already planning on that-"

"Andy, just remember that okay? Stick around."

"Okay," he says finally, ready to be done with this conversation. "Is that why you wanted to know how she's doing?"

"Yes. Now, let me write up your pass." Knope stands and pulls out one of the myriad, multicolored binders that lines the back wall of her classroom.

Part of him thinks that, despite this unnerving conversation, she's thrilled to deal with the paperwork.

* * *

On a cold night, Andy sets out on a mission. He arms himself with a sturdy ladder, a bag of cupcakes and pencils, and his aim towards the room with a light coming from the window. He shivers against a sudden breeze, sighing when he gets to April's house. Inside, the airy tones of a jazz ballad come from the living room. He gently places the ladder against the house and silently congratulates himself on the window being just within reach. Every step of the ladder creaks under his weight, but the music never stops and nobody interrupts him.

At the top of the ladder, Andy's eyes widen. April's standing up with her pajama bottoms on and her back to the window. His face goes red when he realizes he's watching her bare back, the ponytail she's tied her hair into between shoulder blades. She puts on a faded black shirt and flops into bed.

After a second of deep breaths, he knocks on her window gently. She nearly rockets out of the bed and he chuckles.

"Dude, what are you doing here?" she whisper-yells at him when she opens the window. Her face is contorted in annoyance.

"Just-"

"Wait, how long have you been here?" she asks, interrupting him.

"Just, like, uh... a second?" he tries.

"Better be," she growls. He stands there on that ladder for an extra few seconds before she sighs. "Are you coming in or not?"

He scrambles inside and nearly falls on the floor. April lies down on her bed again and sinks into her pillows, of which she has many. There are other stuffed animals from old sitting on the bed, and Andy wonders why he's allowed to see them. Or, frankly, why they're not covered in spikes and demon horns or colored to appear devils.

Her room still has that board adorned with their old drawings. While April puffs out a sigh that brushes her bangs up in the air, he scans that field of memories. Black carvings and purple insignia that bring the warmest memories back to him, and a smile to his face at the very thought. They're not alone though. There's pinned portraits, self-portraits, anatomical studies (April sure has a fascination with hands), and more. In fact, her fascination led to so many days at JJ's where he would order the biggest bucket of fries available, she would set her pad out, and he would leave a fist on the table for her to study, copy, and articulate into the black marks on paper.

It was beautiful, and when he turns to her April is eyeing him curiously.

"What?" she asks.

"Nothing... just admiring your awesome art," he says with a grin.

"Shut up," she mutters with a smile, playing with a bit of hair that's come loose from her ponytail.

"What? It is!" he attests, moving over to the bed. He absentmindedly puts his hand next to her leg and brushes the outside of her calf with his fingertips. It's a habit by now, and April says it tickles enough to be tingly, but not enough to do anything other than make her smile. Which it's doing now. "Your stuff is so amazing. You could be, like, the next Mona Lisa."

"Andy-"

"I'm serious!"

She shakes her hand and smiles. "What are you doing here?" she asks with a chuckle at her breath. "Or did you just to admire my-" she stares at her legs and his hand and then looks him in the eye again. "My art?"

"Well, no-"

"Andy, I told you I don't want to, okay?" she bites back out of nowhere, and only then does he realize the situation they're in. "Give me more-"

"Oh my God, I didn't... April, I wasn't trying to-" he sighs loudly. "April, I didn't want that. I just wanted to hang out."

"Really?" she asks cautiously.

"Yes," he answers truthfully.

"Well you didn't have to sneak into _my_ room," she argues with a growing smirk.

"Yeah, but your dad's drinking and listening to that boring music," he smiles and moves closer to give her the lightest kiss. Even something so natural to them now incites a riot in his lungs and heart, beating thousands of times over where there should only be one. "So I thought we'd make out and-"

"And then you'd go home," she finishes for him, and Andy nods. His lips brush hers while he does it and they can't help themselves.

Andy doesn't end up going home that night, but her father is too drunk to notice and they spend the night cuddling in bed and telling each other scary stories. Andy starts with Swanson's fury at his late arrival to class, and then the burgeoning hatred for Knope that grows out of it.

April only laughs.

* * *

It's a sunny day in Pawnee when Andy's convinced nothing can go wrong. He's in a band that rules, with bandmates that he likes and can hang out with without feeling like they're just in it to make dumb covers, and school is going okay - he finished the Local History project without much of a hassle after Knope's donation to the cause - not to mention April. So, really, his life can't get terrible, can it?

His job at the grocery store is the same as ever, but he still gets paid and he has a surprisingly large bank account despite helping with groceries and little things here and there that his mother will let him get away with. It's strange. Sometimes he's _allowed_ to buy things and other times she gets so mad that she refuses to let him do it. But Andy doesn't complain, since the next day he'll stop at Pawnee's crappy assortment of pizzerias and pick up slices for April and him, and bring some for his mom.

But today, it's sunny and the chilly breeze doesn't get to him. April called in sick for the day, so he goes to school alone. It's fine. He made sure he would go pick her up a big pile of chocolate and maybe try and find one of those stuffed animals for her. The one time he _did_ try that, April nearly screamed at him to death. So, he's allowed to see them but not allowed to partake in the hobby. Andy will never understand it. He presents his project and everyone seems genuinely interested in it, only because Andy practiced with April, his mom, Knope, and even Rivers on how to speak properly in front of people. He has no problem with the people, just the conveyance of his information seems to slip sometimes and he affects accents, mixes up sentences, and even babbles incoherently at times.

He gets a B-plus, far better than he could ever hoped for and way better than he thought he deserved on a final grade. Knope only marked him down from an A because, at one point, he had started reciting the National Anthem. She appreciated the patriotism, but felt it was a bit off-topic.

So, yes, the day is perfect.

On the way back home, he stops to pick up the chocolate like he promised. He only gets a few Snickers bars because those are her favorite, but also because he finds a teddy bear the size of his torso that he just _has_ to buy. She'll love it. He puts the bear in the passenger seat while he drives.

On this perfect day, Andy drives past April's house in his rickety truck and he's never been more afraid of orange in his whole life.

For the first time in nearly ten years, a U-Haul truck is in her driveway.

He parks and steps out slowly. The truck is just there, waiting like it's not uprooting everything. He looks back in his and sees the bear, and his breathing nearly stops. He's processing all of this information, but for some reason none of it has _really_ hit his brain yet.

So he struggles over to the other side of the truck, every step feeling like groping quicksand. His eyes lock on to the truck and never leave it. He opens the door slowly and retrieves her bear. His grip is stronger than he realizes because when he shuts the door, he slams it hard and the thing rattles against the body of the truck.

Mr. Wyatt is reclining on his chair in the living room with a squarish glass of brown liquid in hand. Andy meets his eyes and he nods up the stairs, not saying a word about the gigantic bear in tow. Maybe he's always known, Andy isn't sure. Either way, he steps his way up the stairs like each one is a pair of claws digging into skin. Every step is torturous along the way, and Andy can feel wet, stinging heat against his cheeks.

He brushes it with the back of his hand.

He can hear slamming, stomping, raging behind her door. She is rage right now, but he turns the knob anyways. She shouts; screams, and her face is red with tears and hatred.

April sees him when he enters, ready to swing and claw at him if he were her father. Instead she stops in her tracks, looks at the bear in his hand, and her sad eyes burn with tears again. She opens up with a volley of hatred aimed downstairs, screaming at the top of her lungs, before breaking down and dropping to her knees on the floor.

He steps forward, unable to do _anything_. That board of memories is nothing when she's like this, and the wonderful things that could be seem so far away. Andy sits beside her and puts the bear down in front of her. April stops crying for a moment, sniffles and stares at the bear. Then, he reaches over and wordlessly wraps his arms around her in a tight embrace. She returns it and he can feel her claw into his skin, dig deep into his heart and share in its beating.

* * *

Hours later, after conversation that's burned him up and left him useless, Andy goes home and waits in bed. His mother already knew since that morning when April called off sick. It's clear to him what was happening now. She called off because she had learned that morning that she was moving. She was moving.

They were moving and they'd be gone and April would be moving.

 _Stay in her life._

That's what Knope had said, but what can he do when she's nowhere near him anymore.

So he lies in bed and ponders what the point of any of this is and why it's happening to them. She moved here so long ago and stayed here, and Mr. Wyatt didn't seem to care to move anytime soon anyways. And yet now here they are, and he wants to cry into his pillow and hate the universe for taking him away from her and taking her away.

But then a gentle rapping at his window alerts him. When he goes to check on it, April greets him with a short wave. He opens up, lets her in and looks down the way she came in. She was always so smart, and creative, and came up with the best solutions to these sorts of problems. He's not sure how in the world he's going to survive.

"Hey," he starts and April instantly slinks into his bed. "April, I-"

But he's interrupted by her curling up there. Not with her words, but her actions keeping her safe in that place where no harm could, or ever would, be done to her. He can't see her, the gleam of moonlight minor but illuminating the center of the room at her rug and not in his bed. However, he can feel her heavy breaths from over here and he joins her in bed, lifting the covers and brushing the hair and tears from her cheek. She nestles into him and sighs.

"How long d'you have?" he asks her, kissing the top of her head.

"We're leaving this weekend," she says and there's no fire, no anger, no anything there anymore. It's worse than all of this combined. "Going to Florida."

"Why?"

"Better job," she says flatly. "Dad said I can't live in a dumpster just to hang out with a deadbeat like you."

 _A deadbeat? I have a job and money and could totally let you live in the basement where my brothers used to be!_ Is all he wants to say, all of that and then more but the words never come out of him and he can only hold her tighter in that bed.

"Hey, it's gonna be okay," he whispers into her hair without believing the words.

"You think so?" she mutters, muffled against his chest. "D'you... d'you really think so?"

Her childish optimism, that wetness against his chest, and her small form along his body break his heart. Everything about April is normally so natural and present, and so her and _big_ and real and plain for him to see. Everything here though feels like she's shrinking, away from him and away from herself, and he hears Knope's words ring in his ears.

"Yes," he lies. Lies for Knope, lies for himself, and importantly lies for April.

She looks up and he can barely help himself from crying with her. Instead, she sneaks a kiss in that deepens and he can't stop it or her. He can't stop his own reactions, can't stop her body moving over. He wants to stop her, to tell her that this is a mistake and just days ago it wasn't the right time. He wants her to get off of him, to stop trying to straddle him with tears in her eyes and future regret.

"April," he finally says while she messes with her pajama bottoms and hucks them over the side of his bed. "April, you don't-"

"Andy, please just shut up," she says with a wobble in her voice and a sniff. "Please."

"But, you didn't want this-"

"Andy," she cries out, desperate. It's not anger, and she's stifling back her tears for a moment. "It's... I don't want..."

"We don't have to do this," he whispers. She hasn't moved and he doesn't know where her hands are in relation to clothing-removal, but he tries to focus instead on what matters here, and that's being in her life and not forcing himself out of it because of one, terrible physical decision. "You didn't want this, remember?"

"I _didn't_ ," she emphasizes and sits on top of him, leaning over with the top bunk above her so that she's speaking a few inches from his face. He realizes just how much he's stirred when there's something flat - April's stomach, which has never felt so hot against his skin - for him to rest against. "I didn't, Andy, but now-" she looks between them and sniffs again. Her eyes are glistening but she's got a smile, a trembling bottom lip that seeks comfort and wants to cry more until it's all over. "Just... please."

And this time, this night, Andy regrets nothing. As long as she wants him in her life, he will be there and this is included in that work.

In that work, where she is so uncomfortable and he wants to stop, tells her it'll be okay if they stop, but she refuses. They move a bit, try to find something better for her but it doesn't work and he can't help his body when he is sheathed so nicely, so finely, but she doesn't follow suit. April is still in pain, he can tell by her fingers digging into him and how she shudders awfully when he does move a little. This can't be right - this isn't how it's supposed to happen. But it does, and he hates himself for how amazing it feels physically, but the wounding sickness in his stomach at her body's reaction to his entrance and the end is too much.

She clambers off of him, and though he wants to help her, she just curls up against him and cries.

She cries into the night, and Andy wants to turn back time and throw her off of him to stop that decision. He wants to turn all of this back, every last second of it. But he can't, so he snuggles closer to her, closer than they've ever been but at the same time like she's light-years away in her own, defenseless bubble where she can't scream or rage to safety. Instead, she can only be in his arms and cry.

* * *

That weekend, he hugs her one last time when she gets into her dad's car. She kisses him, but Mr. Wyatt says nothing.

"I'm gonna call every single day for the rest of the year and then I'm gonna come down and get an apartment and we're gonna be-"

"Andy," she interrupts him. "I gotta go."

"Gonna call every single, all the... every _day_ ," he urges her and kisses her again, this time not caring what Mr. Wyatt says or what happens now. He's boiling over with fury and want and the desire to get in his truck and follow them throughout the country down to Florida. He has to, he can't just let her go.

But he has to do that.

He watches her sit in the back seat, lie down and take the oversized stuffed bear he bought for her and cling to it. She nestles her cheek against it and watches him through the opposite window. He waves and then holds up his hands, curled in the shape of a heart.

April smiles back and returns the shape, her face contorting into tears already.

Every thunderous heartbeat after that, watching the car speed off and become a speck in the distance, kills him a little bit more than the last until all that's left is a husk. Waiting, hoping that they can exchange letters, calls... eventually repair what they might have broken nights before.

* * *

"Hey, is April there?" he speaks into the phone.

"Yeah, one second," a gruff voice answers.

A moment later, he's greeted by a sigh. "Thank God, I was so bored today at school," she instantly starts and her crackly voice eases him into a smile. "People here are so lame, and all they talk about is football and guns."

"Sounds like Pawnee," Andy jokes.

"Yeah, but there's no JJ's here," she deadpans.

"Or me," Andy defends with a grin to nobody. His mother is out for the night on a date - something he urged her to go do, despite her own issues with it - and he's alone, talking to April at her home in Florida. An eternity away, but still they had this, at least.

There is, though, a long pause. He hears something over the phone, but can't decipher it. Andy wants to believe it's not what he immediately thinks, but it's okay. It'll be okay, and he's reminded her of that for a week now. Everything is going to be okay, and when he's finally graduated he can come down and live there forever and ever.

"Yeah, there's no you," she sniffles.

"Y'know, your birthday's coming up and-"

"I know when my birthday is, weirdo," she deadpans and he's never grinned wider than that remark. It's so her and regular that maybe they can do this.

"Yeah, but I was thinking that I might take a little road trip and visit you for it," he finishes, unsure. Maybe she's found another guy and that's why she sounds a little timid, and why Mr. Wyatt didn't grill him on what his doings with other girls is like here back at Pawnee.

Frankly, he's had _that_ talk with Ben too. How he got this number, Andy doesn't question. Knope has her ways.

"Yeah, that would..." her voice breaks for a second. "That would be awesome."

Maybe their forever would be like this for a little while. There's spaces between where people don't count, and people can't fathom, from point-to-point in that infinity. Maybe this is their undefined, probabilistic natural _middle_ where things could only get better. Andy wants to believe that, wants to believe that just maybe this is going to turn out fine for them. After all, this isn't impenetrable. She didn't - and the thought nearly crushes him - die or anything. She's just on the other end of the country where he can't make up for that night poorly considered, or hug her, or talk to her and draw with her.

It would have _I love you's_ that he never shared before with her, but now that they're so far away and life could do anything to them it seems strange to hold them back. It would be road trips. He might not be with her, that is for sure. Not permanently at least. He might never be able to make this perfect, as right as April so deserves.

But what he can do, and what he will always do, is be in her life.

* * *

 **an2:** _There is an epilogue. It will be coming much sooner than this chapter took to write._

 _Thank you so much to everyone for being so amazing, patient, and willing to finish the journey with me! There is nothing I can say other than I love you, and I hope that this fic is everything you could have hoped for (even if that ending of this chapter is that!)_

 _Please, comment and let me know how these 10 chapters have made you feel. I need to know that this was for more than just my own peace of mind._

 _I love all of you and thank you for everything!_


	11. Epilogue

**A/N:** _Well, I may have lied about the whole, "I'm gonna get this chapter out earlier than the last" thing. That's okay. It wasn't meant to be a lie, but between work kicking my ass lately and family visiting last week things have been less than inspiring for the whole writing thing._

 _Anyways, this is the last chapter of this fic. Yep, that's right. We've literally come to the end of this._

 _Thanks to everyone that was around when this started, stuck around, and just came around to read this fic. Without you, none of this would happen. No fic, no anything. Thank you so much!_

 _Now, onto the epilogue..._

* * *

The first, probably best detail worth noting about the rented-out party hell is the air conditioning.

Outside of that squat, gray and lifeless building, the Florida heat sticks to you wherever you go and the rejuvenating cool air is a godsend. It's that sort of sweltering morass that doesn't just inconvenience - it's a wave you _sink_ into and drown. Needless to say, murky heat is a dream in comparison when you've got a sea of sweat to worry about. That air conditioning? Well, that may as well have made the place its own isolated heaven. Because otherwise, the almost off-kilter look of the place, leaning and with a wall that caved in about two years before in a nasty wind storm, is less than eerie to be awesome, but creepy enough to threaten total collapse.

Everything around the Podunk they moved to is like that. They all promise safety from the garbage can on fire that is Florida, but the thing most people forget is that inside is just as terrible. Inside is where the people are.

April wishes she didn't have to be in this one, though. At least if she had more concrete information on who would be coming it might be worth it. Another puff from her relaxing deathstick - advantage number one of this place is their lame, no-smoking policy so her dad doesn't drop by on no notice like every year - and she sets off for this horribly suspenseful night.

Inside her selection plays just as requested. A whirring didgeridoo greets her, and the accompanying chanting puts a smile on her face. The DJ rushes to change to something else, and does manage to snag her actual requests of Smiths and Joy Division songs, but the damage is already done. Everybody is talking about it and cracking jokes, leaving the previously smug looking jerk with a red face and shaky hands. He should have known better. That's what he gets for trying to play grab-ass with April Wyatt.

The high school grade night club is filled with people passing by, greeting her noncommittally because they aren't mutual acquaintances at the very least. She doesn't know any of these people, really. They might go to the same school as her, but they're transient in her eyes. It's been three years, but she still feels alien here and these people have no room for her to feel otherwise. She's a forced transplant and it's never been more obvious. In Pawnee, the people there actually felt like they were people. Or maybe that's just how she likes to imagine it being since she hated just as high a percentage of the population. Or, maybe, it was in who she _didn't_ hate. Her classmates were stupid by majority, yes. Did they bully her? Also, yes. But people in Nowhere, Florida are just... there. Void husks that barely even exist in her mind.

She tries not to think about him; about what is rather than what could have been. What _should_ be, really. Too many late nights and that stupid, oversize bear remind her. That, namely, things slid. Nightly calls stayed for a long time, actually. A surprisingly long stretch of months into a year and then some. It was the one thing she asked her dad for back then - just time to talk to Andy. He even visited a few times that year. But then a mutual something happened. A split left a shadow over them, and nightly became weekly - more an obligatory update than honest need.

Frankly, the first night he didn't call she cried.

Not because of the anxiety building over all possibilities, or the dreadful, lingering wonder how he could forget her. No, she cried because all the laws of inevitability were shifting into place. This was _supposed_ to happen, it's how it always happens, but they thought they were different. But they weren't, and she hated that. Hates, still.

Thankfully, though, her one friend in this hellhole is here. When April glances over at the sadly empty bar, she's greeted with a sneer.

"This party is terrible," Lucy, one of the _cool_ kids in the Latina clique, interrupts her reverie.

"Couldn't be any worse than last year," April grumbles loudly over the somber chords of the music.

"What, too old for a clown?" Lucy pouts, mocking with her voice.

"When the clown wants to screw you, you're too old," April heaves herself into a stool at the bar where no alcohol would be served. That's strike one.

Things had changed a lot since the first time she had a drink. Sickly light beer in a basement in Pawnee. Now, she wants shots. Back then, and to be fair still a little bit now, beer was gross. But that was then, and now she just wants to get wasted on her eighteenth birthday with her friend, move on, and stop thinking for a little while. She just wants to get through the night and the memories of birthdays.

"Well, they're clowns," Lucy starts, "so that's, like, true of all of them no matter what."

"ew," April says with a chuckle. "Ugh, please tell me you snuck something in. It's a dry bar."

"Girl, I told you I am on a cleanse," she claims yet again. Lucy obsession this year was health and fitness. Last year she was going to be a solo musician and she started to learn guitar and how to sing before quitting all of it. Who knows what's next. "So no, nothing from me."

"Once again-" April starts.

"Ew," they say in unison before both girls erupt into laughter.

Not hating every person in school, especially not all of the girls, that isn't a teacher is refreshing. Not that April liked Ms. Knope, definitely not. Especially since Ben moved and he mentioned her an awful lot, because _that_ sucked. Lucy could bore April to tears sometimes - just because they both took AP Calculus (horrible decision that April and her GPA that she cares not an ounce for regret) does not mean they both like the subject - but that's everybody. Even Andy could annoy her sometimes.

The thought stills her laugh.

For everything she might say and pretend to be, April is dreadful at this. All of it, the pretending to have forgotten him and hole up, stowing away inside of herself and pretending that she isn't checking up on that memory of him. Checking to make sure that it's locked away - it isn't. It's under lock and key ( _no, it's not_ ) and forgotten, whiled away in her memories forever to be ignored.

Some days, it's impossible. April barely thinks of anything other than stupid phone. Those conversations they had until three in the morning, until one of their parents screamed at them and April kissed the transmitter only to get a laugh and a return blast of noise that she knew was Andy doing the same. All of that, she can't forget. It's simply not possible and she wanders with questions.

 _Why did we stop talking?_

 _Where were you?_

 _When I needed you, where were you?_

Some days, those questions are all that matters. But today, Lucy is going to go solicit for April. Her birthday presents were always so thoughtful. It's all that matters now, the present. Ignoring the past is the best she can do, and nothing helped cure that better than a few drinks and mindless chatter about which popular senior they should draft up assassination contracts for, that's what mattered.

A few more people that came out of courtesy, and that sleazy intern that works with her dad, give her feeble congratulations over nothing, say hello, and generally make her day more awkward than it needs to be. Wanting them gone quickly before anything more lame happens, April flounders for methods. They skitter away at bared fangs and hisses, thankfully. Other than, she couldn't think of much to do to get them out of her hair and back to mingling with people they also don't care about. It's another reprieve, if only for a moment. Why on Earth now? Why couldn't she get these thoughts at home where she could hide with her bear and blankets and forget this bullshit evening and masquerading jerks. Or, better yet, a few crappy horror flicks.

Lucy comes back with the worst news possible. "I couldn't find anything," she says. Huffing a breath out, she sits down on the nearest stool and slumps forward just like April is doing now. "Hey, look, we could ditch this."

"Duh," April replies with a snort of a laugh.

"Why d'you even come?"

"To my own birthday party?" April asks, incredulous.

Yeah, you hate this," Lucy explains. It's true, April only liked the first one that she celebrated here, but Lucy wasn't there for that. She couldn't have known, and she doesn't even know that much about Andy. "C'mon, let's go chill at my house and get some pizza in you."

"I thought you only ate nutritious nut shakes," April jokes.

"It can be my cheat day," she says softly.

April smiles but doesn't laugh. For all the annoyance and weird hobby-hopping, she couldn't help it. Lucy _is_ her friend after all and a night in eating pizza and perhaps a little oversharing from April couldn't hurt. It's another inevitability, after all. Eventually Lucy has to find out why these birthdays suck. After another second of thinking it over, a literal second, April nods. "Let me go dump that DJ's headphones in the toilet first," she says, needing to get still more revenge on the guy.

"He deserve it?" Lucy asks.

"Perv," April answers and jumps off of her seat.

She waits for the guy to leave and get a drink before she pounces. In the bathroom, she scrunches her nose up when the headphones _plop_ and can't help herself from the satisfaction at the simple action. Without her Knight, she had to learn to defend herself better.

A queer pain grips her, and April shakes her head. The pressure builds and she can barely breathe, but April leaves the women's bathroom quickly. The music she requested is replaced with thundering bass, pushing every breath back inside her lungs and keeping her from getting out of this spiral. Each pound of the synthesized bass drum hammers it in - he's not coming. He won't be coming, and she needs to stop thinking about him. Stop, now. Stop it, because otherwise all she can do is keep thinking about him and wondering about those _if's_ and _maybes_ that would spell pain.

But it's impossible.

 _Where were you when I needed you most?_

So April takes a half-breath, the best she can when her chest caves in like this, and tries to stumble her way to the bar that isn't a bar. Every step spreads that blossomed pain in her chest. The thumping music isn't helping, and April has to rub her eyes to try and get the migraine building there out of her skull. Memories of bad dates recently, attempts at really forgetting, flood her and this is all too familiar now.

She expects to find Lucy waiting there for her, alone and just like she left her. It was the normal, the sane, and the expected.

But sometimes life throws you a curve ball.

Sometimes life dumps Andy Dwyer back in your lap.

April can't move. When she sees him in the faded half-light of the hall, everything stops. Her feet lock in place, and her legs are stone with her lungs frozen. Her mouth must hang open because she can taste the foul air of sweaty seniors dancing to this horrible dance music.

In front of her is the same tall boy, but a bit leaner than she remembered and with some of the baseball muscle gone from his frame. His hair is feathered randomly just like she remembers it, bed head that he never fixes and somehow grooms itself over the course of the day into something resembling a style. A black, leather jacket clings to his arms and chest, tired eyes fixated on Lucy and in earnest conversation with her.

When Lucy turns, pointing towards the bathroom, he follows her finger. Follows the smile Lucy has, and Andy's eyes meet hers.

For the first time in two years, he's in front of her right there in that hall. She should hate him, hate him for forgetting about her - for not calling, for giving up, for picking up her slack that she dropped because it was all over and taking it all on himself. Instead, April's eyes burn with a stinging pain that wells up into wet heat at the corners of her eyes.

Before she can recognize it, he's walked up to her. He's right, a half-smile carrying one corner of his mouth upward. "Hey," he says loudly enough for her to hear but quiet enough that it may as well be a mumble.

April has time to think, to respond with reason and hatred. Her first response though isn't in words. She lunges forward and hugs him, arms wrapped around his waist and head buried in his chest. This smell, this feeling, she remembers vividly and April digs deeper in until it's all she can feel right now.

He responds in kind, and she can feel desperation there too. But she should be angry. It's the knife chipping at her this whole time, flickering cuts here and there but she doesn't give in. She needs to be angry with him, but can't find the will to do so.

It's impossible, but so is he. He should be impossible. He can't be here.

"How...?" she yells over the music.

"Called your house," he explains shortly. "Your dad answered."

April can't help herself from breaking into an honest smile, and something drips down her cheek that she ignores because he's still got that goofy half-grin and she can't resist it. Leaning up on her toes, April kisses him.

The sort-of chapped lips, taste of dirt and toothpaste and pizza and beer; the curl of his hair against her fingers when she grips the back of his head; the feel of his whole body against hers; the sound of Lucy shouting for them to get a room; the weight of his body pressed between hers. That feeling is new. When he visited last time, he was still sorry for what she did - what she _wanted_ \- that night before she left Pawnee. It hurt, oh God it was painful and uncomfortable. She didn't even know what she was doing, but she wanted it.

Now, she wants it and his body is not unwelcome. On her birthday, in that rinky-dink bathroom with her back to the wall and sitting on a sink, with his apology on his lips, kissing away her worries and feeding her hunger for him that's been seated and left to rot. Not forgotten, but abandoned in pragmatism. Her clothes are mostly on, his too, and things are shifted away just enough for him to remedy the disaster of night with his mouth before returning to facing her, the physical entwining back and she hears him say it one hundred times in breathy whispers.

"I'm so sorry," he says.

She believes him, and makes a quiet, deep sound in her throat at the recognition in her chest.

When their sweat sticks to their faces, they leave the bathroom hand-in-hand.

* * *

"Y;know, I really dig the uh..." Andy points to his nose.

"The nose ring?" April replies, turning her head to look back up at the stars on the hood of his truck. It dangles between her nostrils like a bull's handler ring. "Lucy talked me into it."

"Oh, the girl I was talking to? She seems cool," he replies, the grip on her hand tightening a bit. "It's cool, too. I mean, yeah. And, uh... I mean, was it-?"

"It was perfect," she interrupts. "The best birthday present I could have asked for."

"Nice," he mutters.

On the hood of his truck, they lie and watch the stars. The broiling heat is remedied a little by the proximity of this impossibility and April has no idea how she's coping. Just an hour ago she was hating herself for thinking about him with no safety net around should anything happen, and now she's here. He's here, more astutely.

Above, things stretch infinitely. Twinkling white lights that remind her of all the possibilities that escaped change now, and come back to the Earth with new information and brightness. They've come back with Andy like they're bright messengers, and she wants to cry and shout and get Lucy, scream thank you for no reason, and remember that he's here. She turns to look at him, her bangs drifting over her face before he reaches over to brush them aside.

"I like this too," he mutters, playing with the dark purple she's streaked through her hair just in this one spot.

"Where've you been for... all this time?" she asks quietly. April has always wondered this.

"Mouse Rat is... y'know, not like big or anything, but we have a CD out and stuff and we're, like, touring," he explains to her without taking his eyes from hers. "So, I suggested we come down South for a few shows."

April shakes her head and can't stop that sting of a tear threatening her eyes. "Dork," she says. "You could've warned me."

"Nah, it's more romantic this way," he says with a shrug against the hood of the car. "And if I know anything about you-"

"Why'd we...?" April can't make herself say it. "What happened?"

Andy turns to look back up and sighs. "Dumb mistakes," he says underneath his breath, but April catches it.

"But you're here now, so..."

"My manager, Tom-" he looks back at her, "You remember Tom from school right? Short, weird dude. Yeah, when we got here he kinda bailed."

"What a loser," April interjects.

"Totally, but we need a new manager now," Andy says and leaves it at that.

April waits a second for the follow-up but nothing comes. She shakes her head. "So? Who is it?" she asks.

Andy grins. "You."

It takes her a second to realize what he's saying and then a smile works its way through her muscles and joins his. Scooting across the truck, she leans forward to kiss him. He returns it, and his lips are real. Real, real flesh and blood and nothing fake here. Just Andy, not imagination. For a moment, she wants to pinch herself and believe that it's a lie. This can't be happening. It's inevitability, isn't it? Forever is inevitable, but they don't get to be in this forever - this infinity. It can't be, but yet... yet, here they are. Here they are and this forever includes them.

They get to make theirs together.

Maybe it would crumble again, April isn't sure. Right now, though, she's staring into the undefined with Andy and the possibility of that is just enough. If they can't have forever, as proven, then maybe they can work at this. Maybe the rest of their lives isn't in the cards, but perhaps they can build their own for a little while. Who knows, maybe it could work? Manager sounds crazy, but knowing Andy that doesn't mean much. This could be their chance though, and April knows that when she kisses him again and again and resumes their sloppy session in the bathroom with the cooling night air on her back.

If they have a shot at it, they can do it. If not, then it would have to be enough. A chance is a chance and they have to try at this, their forever enough.

* * *

 **an2:** _Thank you to everyone that's read this fic - and this chapter that I thought was going to be way shorter!_

 _You're all grand._

 _I hope you've enjoyed the ride for a year and I hope you enjoyed the fic!_


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